Re: Release timelines: 2.15.1 and 2.16

[Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail dot com>]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 4:33 PM, Roland McGrath <roland@hack.frob.com> wrote:
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Schedule has the schedule, and my guess is
> that Josh is the best person to estimate what the next cycle's dates will
> look like.

The traditional Fedora schedule tends to shoot for a new release every
May 1 and October 31, however that has lately morphed into November.
There are inevitably small slips in schedule for various reasons that
lead to that.

Fedora 18 development has technically begun already.  The first Alpha
milestone will likely be ~3 months after the release of F17, Beta 6
weeks after that, and the final F18 GA roughly another 6 weeks out.
If there are slips at one milestone, they typically delay by 1 week at
a time and push out the subsequent milestones as well.

Broadly speaking, I would expect the F18 schedule to look something
like this:

F18 development start: ongoing
F18 branched from rawhide (Alpha freeze): mid August 2012
F18 Alpha: late August 2012
F18 Beta: mid October 2012
F18 GA: Nov 2012

That is very very rough and is going to be dependent on both the
final F17 release and what the Fedora project decides to do with the
F18 schedule.  I'd be happy to send along the final schedule once it
gets created if there is interest.

> It was never very clear to me (even when I was somewhat intimately
> involved) which of the Fedora schedule milestones did or should correspond
> to our libc release process. ?It would be great to have that clarified,
> formalized, and stated on some glibc and Fedora wiki pages.

The trickiest part is knowing when to have Fedora (and glibc) start to
lock down towards a stable release.  If Fedora is always using glibc
git in rawhide (the never stopping development branch), then Fedora
would have a glibc that is fairly close to release by it's Alpha
milestone.  That way the glibc package adheres to the "feature freeze"
deadline.  By Fedora Beta, the glibc package in that release would
likely be released upstream.  Then the Fedora Beta->GA period would be
targetted fixes only.

If the glibc community wants to do releases that track to Fedora for
whatever reason, the easiest way to do that would to basically offset
glibc development to be a few months ahead of Fedora releases.  E.g.

F18 development start -> glibc-2.16 Alpha
F18 Alpha -> glibc 2.16 Beta
F18 Beta -> glibc 2.16 release
F18 GA -> glibc 2.16.1 (or targetted fixes)

Obviously that isn't going to be a perfect matchup every time, but
something close to it is probably sufficient even if there aren't
official glibc milestones along the way.

josh