Hi Andreas, On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 at 20:08, Andreas Färber <afaer...@suse.de> wrote: > > Hi, > > Am 22.06.19 um 20:15 schrieb Simon Glass: > > On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 at 16:10, Andreas Färber <afaer...@suse.de> wrote: > >> Am 22.06.19 um 16:55 schrieb Simon Glass: > >>> I'd like to better understand the benefits of the 3-month timeline. > >> > >> It takes time to learn about a release, package and build it, test it on > >> various hardware, investigate and report errors, wait for feedback and > >> fixes, rinse and repeat with the next -rc. Many people don't do this as > >> their main job. > >> > >> If we shorten the release cycle, newer boards will get out faster (which > >> is good) but the overall quality of boards not actively worked on > >> (because they were working good enough before) will decay, which is bad. > >> The only way to counteract that would be to automatically test on real > >> hardware rather than just building, and doing that for all these masses > >> of boards seems unrealistic. > > > > Here I think you are talking about distributions. But why not just > > take every second release? > > You're missing my point: What good is it to do a release when you > yourself consider it of such poor quality that you advise others not to > take it?
Who said that? Your point, I thought, was that people didn't have time to test it? > > That has nothing per-se to do with who uses that release and whether you > build it in OBS or locally. > > > I have certain had the experience of getting a board our of the > > cupboard and finding that the latest U-Boot doesn't work, nor the one > > before, nor the three before that. > > > > Are we actually seeing an improvement in regressions? > > I don't understand that question. The proposal, as I understood it, is > to shorten the release cycle by one month, doing six instead of four > releases. How could there be an improvement by leaving it as it is? My > fear is that the change will make it _worse_, i.e. no improvement but > rather risk of more regressions by switching to _two_ months. > > In this very same -rc4 thread I reported one such regression, and > luckily a patch was quickly prepared to address it. It's not yet merged > despite tested - review also takes time. > > > I feel that > > testing is the only way to get that. > > Agreed. And my point was that testing takes time. Increasing the release > frequency shortens the time for testing of each release. > > > Perhaps we should select a small subset of boards which do get tested, > > and actually have custodians build/test on those for every rc? > > Many custodians are volunteers. You can't force them to test boards at a > pace you dictate to them. Also, more frequent releases also increase the > chances of a custodian/maintainer being on vacation during a release. > > And a working, say, BeagleBone doesn't make the user of a random other > board any happier. ;-) Another question...how much do people care about the latest and greatest features? Perhaps we should be merging patches frequently, but creating a release branch separate from master? The current process seems very very slow to me. Regards, Simon _______________________________________________ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de https://lists.denx.de/listinfo/u-boot