release schedule change proposal

[Luca Boccassi]

On Mon, 2021-11-15 at 15:58 +0100, Thomas Monjalon wrote:
> For the last 5 years, DPDK was doing 4 releases per year,
> in February, May, August and November (the LTS one):
> 	.02   .05   .08   .11 (LTS)
> 
> This schedule has multiple issues:
> 	- clash with China's Spring Festival
> 	- too many rushes, impacting maintainers & testers
> 	- not much buffer, impacting proposal period
> 
> I propose to switch to a new schedule with 3 releases per year:
> 	.03      .07      .11 (LTS)
> 
> New LTS branch would start at the same time of the year as before.
> There would be one less intermediate release during spring/summer:
> .05 and .08 intermediate releases would become a single .07.
> I think it has almost no impact for the users.
> This change could be done starting next year.
> 
> In details, this is how we could extend some milestones:
> 
> 	ideal schedule so far (in 13 weeks):
> 		proposal deadline: 4
> 		rc1 - API freeze: 5
> 		rc2 - PMD features freeze: 2
> 		rc3 - app features freeze: 1
> 		rc4 - last chance to fix: 1
> 		release: 0
> 
> 	proposed schedule (in 17 weeks):
> 		proposal deadline: 4
> 		rc1 - API freeze: 7
> 		rc2 - PMD features freeze: 3
> 		rc3 - app features freeze: 1
> 		rc4 - more fixes: 1
> 		rc5 - last chance buffer: 1
> 		release: 0
> 
> Opinions?

We upload only LTS releases to Debian/Ubuntu, so as long as those stay
the same as it is proposed here, no problem for us.

-- 
Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi