NGINX (again) and 20.04 Development Cycle

[Thomas Ward]

Whenever we approach an April release, we have to always be considering 
NGINX and the fact that around the same time we release a new stable 
version is cut from Mainline.

What this means is, as NGINX decides to release a Stable version they 
use the NGINX Mainline branch to do more active feature development, 
feature implementations, etc. and then once it's cut 'no longer support 
the older versions of NGINX' before it.

Currently, we have been tracking NGINX 1.16.x which in April will become 
the "No Longer Supported" branch and at this point will be over a year 
old.  NGINX Mainline is currently at 1.17.5 and has bugfixes, feature 
changes/revisions/updates, etc. and will eventually become NGINX 1.18.x 
around when we release 20.04 LTS.

In the past around the LTS releases we've switched from tracking NGINX 
Stable to NGINX Mainline in anticipation of a right-before-release or 
shortly-after-release upload to change the version string from 1.17.x to 
1.18.0 to coincide with NGINX upstream releases.  I'm not fond of 
keeping 1.16.x in the repos for 20.04 LTS if I can avoid it, since it's 
technically no longer supported once NGINX releases upstream. around 
when we release 20.04.

Do we want to pursue this approach of tracking Mainline again with the 
intention of FFes and MREs during the dev cycle up until the 1.18.x 
release after which we SRU that version string change that in?

The other alternative is to keep 1.16.x in the repositories and then 
forcibly jump to 1.18.0 later but that's a more major version bump with 
a lot of feature changes.  (I'd like at least for 20.04 to get on the 
latest NGINX Mainline branch with the intention of keeping it updated 
with FFes during dev and then a final version string change either just 
before or just after release to get us tracking 1.18.x as the version 
number.)


I'd be happy to file any relevant requests to the Release Team ahead of 
time to get any of the devel cycle headaches handled.


Thomas

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