releases: Shall we reevaluate the release candence for the 2.4.0 and onwards?

[fidencio]

During a few release cycles we experimented with a shorter cadence for our releases, which combined with the maintainence of only one stable branch, has had some impact on our users.

The current way of handling releases, as described here has made a release life-cycle reasonably short, maybe way too short for some companies taste.

Moving to a longer period could have a negative impact of waiting for too long in order to get something out, and also increasing the maintainence burden on the stable branch, but then companies could be able to rely more on the stable branches.

This, combined with a LTS proposal made some time ago could be explored for finding the right balance between what we currently have and what we may want to do.

/cc @amshinde @bergwolf @egernst @sameo @kata-containers/redhat

[jodh-intel]

+1 to re-evaluating. Sounds like a good topic for the AC meeting. But also, we should explore the question in the user survey to get as much exposure around the question as possible.

[fidencio]

The form was sent out: https://forms.gle/nWM7kdcfX88Edkkt7 and http://lists.katacontainers.io/pipermail/kata-dev/2021-December/002296.html

[fidencio]

After pretty much 2 weeks of the form being out, we had 7 answers: 5 from the architecture committee, one from IBM, one from Red Hat.

With the form we learned that:

• 57.1% of the voters are not happy with the current release cadence
  • 1 minor release every 12 weeks, 1 patch release every 3 weeks
• 57.1% of the voters are not happy with the current support time of the stable branch
  • 12 weeks
• About the minor release cadence ...
  • 28.6% of the voters would prefer a minor release every 24 weeks
  • 28.6% of the voters would prefer a minor release every 12 weeks
    • This is the same as we have Today
  • 14.3% of the voters prefer a minor release every 4 weeks
  • 14.3% of the voters prefer a minor release every 16 weeks
  • 14.3% of the voters chose "other", and stated:
    • 3 months (12 weeks) is fine, but shorter cadence would work as well
• About the patch release cadence ...
  • 57.1% of the voters prefer a patch release every 4 weeks
  • 28.6% prefer dropping the patch releases entirely
  • 14.3% prefer a patch release every 3 weeks
    • This is what we currently have
• And about how long the stable branch should be maintained, we got the following feedback:
  • 3 answers with 4 months
  • 2 answers stating that 3 months is fine
  • 1 answer saying 6 months
  • 1 answer saying that there shouldn't be a stable branch at all
  • And one comment that was raised twice is that around major releases, the maintenance of the stable branch should be done for 6, 9, or even 12 months
    • This would cause an overlap and we'd maintain 2 stable branches for a while.

[fidencio]

From what we get from the answers the new model would be:

• A minor release every 12 weeks --> Same as Today
• A patch release every 4 weeks --> 1 month more than what we have Today
• The stable branch should be maintained for 16 weeks --> 1 month fmore than what we have Today, and that would cause an overlap so we end up maintaining 2 stable branches.

My suggestion here is:

• minor releases: every 16 weeks (4 months)
  • this is the middle ground between the 2 most voted options
  • this means there's a change, as the majority of the voters are not happy with current model
• patch releases: every 4 weeks (once per month)
• stable branch is maintained for 16 weeks (4 months)
  • this means there's no overlap between stable branches maintenance

I'd like to hear from @amshinde, @ariel-adam, @bergwolf, @egernst, @sameo, and @skaegi if my proposal is fair.

[fidencio]

During the architecture committee meeting held on Dec 14th, 2021, we agreed on following the suggestion of having minor releases every 4 months, with patch releases happening every month. The stable branch will be maintained for 4 months, and the wiki is already updated (see: https://github.com/kata-containers/community/wiki/Release-Team-Rota).

I'll raise a new issue to update https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/blob/main/docs/Stable-Branch-Strategy.md and I'm closing this one now.

[jodh-intel]

Thanks @fidencio ! Yep, a new table in that doc would summarise that nicely.