We've been working for years on releasing new main-line releases sooner rather than later. We're getting closer and closer to our target goal of a new Y in X.Y releases every 9 months or so (as opposed to what used to be years between major releases).
The side-effect of this has been that maintaining the older branches has become somewhat more difficult because there are more and more branches to maintain if we want to maintain them for any particular length of time. In the past, our typical policy has been to maintain the last 3-4 branches and obsolete one after a new major branch gets published. But we know that a large number of third-party developers track the older releases for quite some time and thus need patches to continue to be applied to older releases. So, we're trying to balance our work load between feature improvements vs longer-term stability of older branches. This is where help is needed: what is more important to you? How do you think we can best support both rapid main-line releases as well as older patch-branch releases? Without your feedback we'll pick on our own, so now is the chance to give an opinion! Our thoughts going forward will pick between: 1) continue the current trend of 3-4 back patch branches being maintained, realizing that this will mean a branch lifetime decreasing to as little as 3 * .75 = 2.25 years. 2) increase the current back-patch branches maintained to 5-6 or so, which would mean a branch maintenance lifetime of 5 * .75 = 3.75 or so. This would likely have a negative impact on our feature development process, and we're not keen on this idea. 3) Mark every other past branch as a "long term" release branch so that some of the branches would be maintained longer than potentially some of the later ones. EG (making up versions here and this is not a final proposal), 5.2 and 5.4 could be long term branches and 5.3 and 5.5 would be shorter term branches. Or some other combination (like every 3rd being a long term). 4) Your idea here We'd love any feedback you feel like providing the core-developers who frequently volunteer their personal time to produce these releases. -- Wes Hardaker Please mail all replies to [email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Benefiting from Server Virtualization: Beyond Initial Workload Consolidation -- Increasing the use of server virtualization is a top priority.Virtualization can reduce costs, simplify management, and improve application availability and disaster protection. Learn more about boosting the value of server virtualization. http://p.sf.net/sfu/vmware-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Net-snmp-users mailing list [email protected] Please see the following page to unsubscribe or change other options: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/net-snmp-users
