Questions about the release cycle

[ryysud]

Hi, I have two questions about the release cycle of SPIRE.

1. Is there a published schedule for releasing new minor and patch versions, or a policy for releasing them periodically?
2. Are the discussions for deciding what features to release in the new version published anywhere? (e.g. Slack Channel, Meeting notes, Google groups or GitHub Repo)

Thank you.

[evan2645]

Hello @ryysud! I am stealing this issue from @azdagron :)

Is there a published schedule for releasing new minor and patch versions, or a policy for releasing them periodically?

There is no published release schedule because the timing can be highly variable and depends on a lot of different things. That said, we try to release approximately once a month.

Are the discussions for deciding what features to release in the new version published anywhere? (e.g. Slack Channel, Meeting notes, Google groups or GitHub Repo)

Most of the time, we "release what we have". New features are usually shipped with minor releases unless they represent a compatibility concern. If there is a compatibility concern, the feature is held back until the next major release.

Release candidates are identified one week before release. Features that get merged during this one week window won't ship with the release unless it's an important bugfix. Much of our release process is documented in MAINTAINERS.md.

I am curious about why you ask this question :). Can you tell me a little more about what you're trying to learn/plan/understand? We know that there is room to improve in the area of release observability, however we're not quite sure where our time would be best spent.

[ryysud]

Thank you for your answer, @evan2645!

I understood the release cycle of SPIRE very well!
Also, I will check out the MAINTAINERS.md to learn more.

I am curious about why you ask this question :). Can you tell me a little more about what you're trying to learn/plan/understand?

I explain the background of the question.
We are currently considering organizing the following teams:

• SPIRE Development Team
  • Develop the custom plugin for OpenStack
  • Provide the SPIRE artifacts containing the plugin (e.g. Docker images, RPM files)
  • Q&A and Troubleshooting
  • Contribute to SPIRE
• SPIRE Operation Team
  • Operate SPIRE Server
  • Provide the instance containing SPIRE Agent

Since I am part of the SPIRE Development Team,
I consider to provide the following information to the SPIRE Operation Team:

• Periodic upgrades schedule
• Introduction of new features
• The release date of new features
• The release date of the bugfix in case of problems
• and more

So I asked the question because we wanted to know if SPIRE has the release cycle rule like Kubernetes.

[evan2645]

@ryysud I am wondering about this issue - do you feel like the current release process is sufficient for you? Or do you need more visibility into releases, and if so, do you have any ideas on how to improve? I certainly feel like we could be doing better, but am not sure exactly how :)