[dpdk-dev] [PATCH v1] doc: add guidelines on stable and lts releases

[Yuanhan Liu]

On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 01:06:22PM +0000, John McNamara wrote:
> Add document explaining the current Stable and LTS process.

John, great doc! Thanks.

Here I got one more thing to discuss about the stable release: the release
cycle. (I may better start a new thread, but I hope it would be a short
discussion, so I didn't bother with that).

16.07 as a first trial of stable release, I made a proposal to have 2
releases: v16.07.1 shortly after v16.11-rc1 and v16.07.2 shortly after 
v16.11. While the gap between v16.07 and v16.11 are 4 months, doing a
release each 2 month doesn't seem that bad. It may a bit stretch then
because the gap is shorter (3 months) since 16.11. Besides, the validation
team here are pretty busy after rc1, meaning it doesn't seem a good idea
to have another release shortly after that: they may quite be burdened.

So I'm proposing to make one stable/LTS release per release cycle. For
example, we will have v16.11.1 shortly after v17.02, and judging that
v16.11 is a LTS release, we will have v16.11.2 after v17.05, and so on.

And my plan towards a release is, I will monitor (by a script) the
official tree regularly (normally, weekly), and pick patches from there
if any to a specific stable branch. As before, an email notification will
be sent to the author and all email addresses mentioned in the patch
(normally, they are maintainers, reviewers, etc) once a patch is picked
as a stable candidate.

Doing this regularly, hopefully, tells people that DPDK stable/LTS is
live and actively maintained.

Any objections? If no, I could start picking patches since the beginning
of next week.

Thanks.

	--yliu