Let's get real about releases

[Robbie Williamson]

Why not follow the approach the MAAS dev team[1] has?  They have 3 PPAs:
 * Daily - Daily build of trunk
 * Testing - Users who want to *test* new features
 * Stable - Users who want to *use* new features
Then we'd *only* sync in Ubuntu from Stable.

-Robbie

[1] https://launchpad.net/~maas-maintainers

On 04/17/2012 04:11 AM, William Reade wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-04-17 at 19:29 +1200, Robert Collins wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 5:50 PM, Clint Byrum <clint at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>> Hey guys, so as I finish testing in preparation for the final upload
>>> of juju to precise tomorrow, I can't help but wonder if there can be a
>>> better way.
>>
>> Juju is aim at cloud deployments, and the cloud APIs we work with
>> don't have a release schedule (instead they are -very- careful about
>> backwards compatibility).
> 
> They may not have schedules, but they do have releases; I count 21 EC2
> API versions since May 2008, and I'm pretty sure that those aren't just
> a series of automated trunk snapshots.
> 
>> Perhaps instead of aiming at a slow cadence, we could ratchet it up a
>> knotch: make trunk always release quality, and put some effort into
>> backwards compat.
> 
> This has always been the ideal; in practice, despite our noble
> intentions and honest efforts, we fall short. There's certainly scope
> for disagreement about the length of the cycles, and I imagine the
> details will evolve.
> 
> However, we are demonstrably not capable of maintaining trunk in such a
> way as to make it infallibly backward-compatible with every previous
> version of trunk; to change the process to allow for *that* would be to
> demand an exponentially-increasing QA effort for every commit, on top of
> our already stringent and costly review process.
> 
> It's already *hard* landing a feature in Juju, and the review and
> maintenance of long-term parallel branches take up a significant
> proportion of our resources; IMO, to "ratchet it up a notch" is to run
> the risk of stalling development entirely.
> 
> Cheers
> William
> 
> 


-- 
Robbie Williamson <robbie.williamson at canonical.com>
Director of Engineering, Ubuntu Server
Canonical

"You can't be lucky all the time, but you can be smart everyday"
 -Mos Def