On Tuesday, January 29, 2019 10:40:37 AM Wietse Venema wrote: > I'm reconsidering the once-per-year schedule for stable releases. > Basically, a Postfix stable release freezes development at a point > in time, forever. Primarily, this is good for stability. > > * In this day and age it seems archaic to have to wait for up to a > year before useful code can be deployed in a stable release. > > * The once-per-year schedule makes development a race to get things > into the upcoming release, so that it does not have to wait for > another year. > > There is a downside to less than a year between stable releases: > the support time window will become less than four years. Currently, > four stable releases are supported, and that is unlikely to change. > > Examples of things that have been ready for months: > > - TLS connection reuse without closing/reconnecting, a big deal for > sites that send many messages, completed in June 2018. > > - BDAT support, requested by a provider, completed in August 2018. > > Things that are ready in ~week, expected to be in Postfix 3.4.0: > > - SNI support is feature and documentation complete. We are polishing > some externally-visible behavior such as message headers and logging. > > - Logging to file or stdout, to work around crippled infrastructure > (MacOS, systemd), or to make Postfix play nice with containers. > This interrupted my work on BURL support (see below). > > Things that we're racing to implement, so that they would not have > to wait until 2020: > > - OpenSSL configuration file support. > > - BURL (submit email without downloading content from IMAP server > first). Reuses most of the BDAT code. > > - And so on. > > A higher release frequency would help to get good code out the door > without having to race against a once-per-year schedule. But, as > mentioned, it also reduces the length of time that a given release > will be supported.
>From my perspective as the primary packager for Debian, I think a faster release cycle would possibly have very little impact on us, it mostly depends how much faster. Currently you are supporting releases a bit longer than we need. If you switch to a new release every 9 months, I don't think that would impact us significantly. If you switch to every 6 months, then I would start to worry about supporting Debian stable users properly. Would you consider doing limited support (security fixes only perhaps) for an additional release or two? If so, then I would think even 6 months wouldn't hurt us. It would definitely help with the problem of our freeze schedule being slightly behind the postfix release schedule, so we just miss the newest version. Scott K
