[dpdk-dev] DPDK short term stable maintenance

[Kevin Traynor]

On 12/03/2019 20:46, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> On Tue, 2019-03-12 at 19:12 +0000, Kevin Traynor wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> This is about short term stable maintenance, ~3 months based on
>> n.02/05/08 DPDK. It is **not** referring/impacting DPDK LTS,
>> maintained
>> for ~2 years based on n.11 DPDK.
>>
>> The effort and usefulness of short term stable maintenance was raised
>> previously and in the last DPDK Release meeting [1], so sending mail
>> to
>> kick off discussion here...
>>
>> Currently DPDK 19.02 stable branch has no maintainer and it has been
>> difficult to get the companies to validate DPDK 18.08.1 RC. There
>> seems
>> to be a lack of appetite in the community for short term stables, or
>> at
>> least for all of them, and hence giving resources for helping them.
>>
>> It could be that users are either moving from latest bleeding edge
>> master release to the next, or settling on DPDK LTS for an extended
>> period of time - I'm just speculating, but IMHO that would not be a
>> bad
>> thing.
>>
>> So what to do with short term stables? Some choices could be:
>>
>> - continue with short term stables for n.02/05/08
>> - ad-hoc support for short term stables where community have an
>> interest
>> in a particular one
>> - have a maintainer to backport fixes on a public branch, but have no
>> releases, or have unvalidated/best effort validated releases
>> - no short term stable branches/releases
>>
>> Probably there's other ideas too. Obviously most of the above would
>> need
>> resources from the community to proceed. One advantage of not having
>> short term stables is that there might be more resources available
>> for
>> maintenance/validation of master and LTS DPDK releases.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> thanks,
>> Kevin.
>>
>> [1] https://mails.dpdk.org/archives/dev/2019-March/126006.html
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Thanks for starting the discussion.
> 
> My 2c is that, unless someone steps up not only for the maintainer role
> but also for the validation effort, we should cancel the short term
> releases.
> 

+1

In fact the docs do not make any commitment that there will be stables
(other than the LTSs), but in practice it has been the case that every
recent DPDK release has had a stable branch and stable release. I will
add a note in the docs that validation commitments are also needed for a
stable to proceed.