Thanks for the detailed response Sean. I don't have an issue with the cycle model - Ironic is still tied to the cyclical release model. The part that I disagree with is the requirement to create an intermediary release. It shouldn't be a problem if bifrost doesn't make a feature release between Train and Ussuri, we'll just do a final Ussuri release. It's the intermediary I'd like to be optional, rather than the final cycle release.
I would suggest switching these to cycle-with-rc then. There is one release candidate that has to happen just before the final release for the cycle, but that's mainly to make sure everything is in good shape before we declare it done. That sounds like it might fit better with what the team wants to do here. But what if we want to create a feature release mid-cycle? Some cycles we do, some we don't.
With cycle-with-rc, that does allow *beta* releases to be done at any point during the cycle. But those would be marked as b1, b2, etc. releases. This allows those that want to try out upcoming features to grab them if they want them, but would prevent anyone else from accidentally picking up something before it is quite ready. I'm guessing this might not be what you are looking for though. We do have another release model called cycle-automatic. This was introduced for tempest plugins to just do a release at the end of the cycle to make sure there is a tag to denote the tempest version the plugin was originally developed for. Since some plugins are being picked up more often downstream, this model does allow for additional releases to be proposed at any point during the development cycle. We will need to discuss this as a team to see if this makes sense for non-tempest plugins. It was intended only for those types of deliverables. I just mention it here as something that we do have in place that might be adapted to fit what the team needs. But we also need to consider what we are communicating to downstream consumers of our releases, so I'm not entirely sure at this point if it makes sense, or would be a good thing, to allow other types of deliverables to use this model. Sean