[openstack-dev] [all] Re-evaluating the suitability of the 6 month release cycle

Ed Leafe ed at leafe.com
Thu Feb 26 13:36:28 UTC 2015


On Feb 25, 2015, at 6:06 PM, Thomas Goirand <zigo at debian.org> wrote:

> In fact, if you want to judge from the POV of our users, we should *SLOW
> DOWN* our release cycles, and probably move to something like one
> release every year or 2. We should also try to have longer periods of
> support for our stable releases, which would (with my Debian package
> maintainer hat on!) help distributions to do such security support.
> 
> Debian Jessie will be released in a few month from now, just before
> Icehouse (which it ships) will be EOL. RedHat, Canonical, IBM, and so
> many more are also on the same (sinking) ship.
> 
> As for my employer side of things, we've seen numerous cases with our
> customer requesting for LTS, which we have to provide by ourselves,
> since it's not supported upstream.

I think you've nailed where the disconnect is between the two sides of this issue: what exactly do we see OpenStack being? You brought up several Linux vendors who ship on a longish cycle, and who provide LTS for their releases. But Linux itself is on no such cycle, nor does it provide long term anything.

OpenStack can't be all things to all people. Following the Linux analogy, we need a few companies who want to become OpenStack distributors, packagers, and supporters, in the manner of RedHat, Canonical, etc., are for Linux. As a development project, we need to be able to move fluidly, and the release cycle deadlines and freezes get in the way of that. As a packager and distributor, the release cycle scheduler *helps* immeasurably. We can't be both.


-- Ed Leafe





-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 842 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/attachments/20150226/e044ec26/attachment.pgp>


More information about the OpenStack-dev mailing list