Re: 3.35/3.36 schedule vs moving Tarballs Due to Fridays

[mcatanzaro gnome org]

On Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 7:02 AM, mcatanzaro gnome org wrote:
> * 12 months of stable releases; this means the schedule will be 18 
> months total rather than 6

BTW this was the one remaining topic I wanted to discuss before 
proposing a new schedule.

We agreed at GUADEC on 12 months of stable releases. There are two 
counterproposals, 13 months or 9 months:

* 13 months (Fedora-style) gives an extra month of support period so 
that it's possible to skip a runtime without going outside a support 
period, if you plan ahead to upgrade during the 13th month. This means 
we'd support four runtimes at once during the 13th month: three stable 
runtimes and the unstable runtime. I think it's simpler to plan for 12 
months of releases and just not mark the runtime as deprecated until a 
month after the last release, that way we only ever have to support 
three at once.

* 9 months (Ubuntu-style) has a three-month upgrade window, long 
enough to provide a comfortable upgrade window but short enough that 
everyone knows to look elsewhere for LTS (e.g. to freedesktop-sdk, or a 
hypothetical future RHEL runtime). With this support period, we'd half 
the time have three runtimes to support (two stable runtimes and the 
unstable runtime, during the first three months after a new release), 
and the other half of the time only two runtimes (one stable runtime 
and the unstable runtime, during the three months before the next 
release). We could still do an LTS runtime on a separate schedule if we 
ever decide to do so (e.g. for GNOME 3.36).

An opinions? My vote is 9 months, because I fear we underestimate the 
effort involved in maintaining three different runtimes at once. But I 
will propose a schedule for 12 unless I hear opinions to the contrary, 
because 12 is what we have already agreed on.

Michael