For the last 5 years, DPDK was doing 4 releases per year,
in February, May, August and November (the LTS one):
.02 .05 .08 .11 (LTS)
This schedule has multiple issues:
- clash with China's Spring Festival
- too many rushes, impacting maintainers & testers
- not much buffer, impacting proposal period
I propose to switch to a new schedule with 3 releases per year:
.03 .07 .11 (LTS)
New LTS branch would start at the same time of the year as before.
There would be one less intermediate release during spring/summer:
.05 and .08 intermediate releases would become a single .07.
I think it has almost no impact for the users.
This change could be done starting next year.
In details, this is how we could extend some milestones:
ideal schedule so far (in 13 weeks):
proposal deadline: 4
rc1 - API freeze: 5
rc2 - PMD features freeze: 2
rc3 - app features freeze: 1
rc4 - last chance to fix: 1
release: 0
proposed schedule (in 17 weeks):
proposal deadline: 4
rc1 - API freeze: 7
rc2 - PMD features freeze: 3
rc3 - app features freeze: 1
rc4 - more fixes: 1
rc5 - last chance buffer: 1
release: 0
Opinions?
