[RFC] Releases planning

[Martin Pool]

On 8 October 2010 10:02, Max Bowsher <maxb at f2s.com> wrote:
>>
>> Yes, I'd like to know too :) Hey packagers ! What do you think ?
>
> Most scenarios of packaging do not package all released series,
> generally sticking only to latest stable and latest beta. Thus, it's not
> really an issue.

True.

>> - still backport bugfixes targeted at debian or Ubuntu for the 2.0
>>   series, but in the packaging branch instead of our lp:bzr/2.0 or
>>   lp:bzr/2.1 branches... which would make a good dogfood exercise...
>
> I submit that 2.0 is of zero interest at this point. Ubuntu lucid and
> Debian squeeze are on 2.1.x. The only Ubuntu series on 2.0 is karmic,
> which has a mere ~6 months of support left.

That makes sense too.

>> We could indeed create a ppa for each stable series and update it when
>> we release a new stable series. That would ensure that our users get a
>> coherent set of plugins with bzr itself (which the SRUs don't offer).

Uh, the SRUs certainly _should_ offer coherent plugins.  If changing
to a new bugfix version breaks the plugins the SRU can't proceed.  At
the moment we have not normally attempted to offer plugin bugfixes
through SRUs but we could, if they too maintain a stable branch.

> I would like to strongly suggest that we do NOT create a PPA for each
> stable series. It would GREATLY increase the PPA maintenance burden, and
> it's unclear to me that there are any scenarios where a PPA user cannot
> update to the latest stable series.

I don't think we should have a new live PPA for each series.  I do
think it might be worthwhile to have a ppa that archives the last
state of bzr before we upgraded to a new series - ie before we move
2.3 into the bzr ppa, copy everything into a 2.2 ppa, which is then no
longer updated.  Perhaps it's not often going to be useful but it
seems fairly easy to do.  (otoh cutting even small waste is good...)

-- 
Martin