release schedule change proposal

[Ajit Khaparde]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 6:58 AM Thomas Monjalon <thomas at monjalon.net> 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
+1

>
> Opinions?
>
>