Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] Planning for 1.0 (and freezing the master branch)

[Blue Swirl]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Anthony Liguori <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've posted an initial proposal for the 1.0 release on the wiki[1].
>
> The release would be targeted for December 1st.  Unlike previous releases,
> I'm proposing that instead of forking master into a stable branch and
> releasing from there, we stop taking features into master and all work on
> stablizing master.
>
> Historically, we forked stable for the releases simply because it was the
> least intrusive way to get us on a somewhat reasonable release schedule.  I
> think especially since we're targeting a 1.0, we're ready to get a bit more
> serious about releases.

Even more historically, with CVS, not forking was the only way.

> I see the following advantages in using master for releases:
>
> 1) All maintainers are participating in the process which means releases are
> much less likely to be delayed due to lack of time from a single person.
>
> 2) Everyone (contributors) are forced to focus on stability which should
> improve the release's quality.
>
> 3) Feature development can still happen in maintainers trees.  I think this
> is an important step to moving to a merge-window based development model
> which I think will be our best way to scale long term.
>
> Obviously, this will only work well if all the maintainers participate so
> I'd really like to hear what everyone thinks about this.
>
> [1] http://wiki.qemu.org/Planning/1.0

In general the idea is OK. Especially soft freeze could solve problems
like those qemu-ga inclusion had.

Two weeks for soft freeze would be close to OK but I think a month of
hard freeze is too long. With the previous releases, the problems in
stable were ironed out within a week or two. How about 2 + 2?

I'm not convinced about merge window model at least how it's used with
Linux kernel development. There will be a lot of breakage during the
merge window. Major changes at the same time would need major rebasing
efforts since they would be developed and merged within same time
frame. Also pretty strong coordination would be needed. We don't have
the luxury of infinite army of monkeys lead by genius who has
dedicated his entire life to the project like kernel has. I'd rather
try to keep the code base at (sort of) release quality at all times
and merge changes every now and then.