I don't think the motivation here is vendor play or taking away power from committers. Having a regular release cadence helps our users understand when a feature will ship so they can plan their upgrades. Having an EOL policy and a minimum support period helps users choose a release line, and understand when they will need to upgrade.
In the earlier thread, we discussed how these are not rules, but guidelines. There's a lot of flexibility if someone wants to keep maintaining a release line (particularly if they are willing to do the backporting work). More power to them; more releases are a good thing for the project. My main concern (which I raised on the earlier thread) is that without significant improvements to the release process and upstream integration testing, it's unlikely we'll actually ship more releases. Too often, branches are simply not in a releaseable state, or they have latent blocker bugs due to a lack of testing. This is what we've been struggling with on both the 2.8.x and 3.0.0-x release lines. So, in the abstract, I'm +1 on having a published policy on release cadence and EOL. This information helps users. However, I don't think we're ready to actually execute on this policy for the above reasons. This leaves me ambivalent overall, perhaps -0 since publishing a policy we don't follow is more confusing to users. My 2c, Andrew On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 12:28 PM, Arpit Agarwal <aagar...@hortonworks.com> wrote: > The ASF release policy says releases may not be vetoed [1] so the EOL > policy sounds unenforceable. Not sure a release cadence is enforceable > either since Release Managers are volunteers. > > 1. https://www.apache.org/dev/release.html#approving-a-release > > > > On 1/18/17, 7:06 PM, "Junping Du" <j...@hortonworks.com> wrote: > > +1 on Sangjin's proposal - > "A minor release line is end-of-lifed 2 years after it is released or > there > are 2 newer minor releases, whichever is sooner. The community > reserves the > right to extend or shorten the life of a release line if there is a > good > reason to do so." > > I also noticed Karthik bring up some new proposals - some of them > looks interesting to me and I have some ideas as well. Karthik, can you > bring it out in a separated discussion threads so that we can discuss from > there? > > About Chris Trezzo's question about definition of EOL of hadoop > release, I think potentially changes could be: > 1. For users of Apache hadoop, they would expect to upgrade to a new > minor/major releases after EOL of their current release because there is no > guarantee of new maintenance release. > > 2. For release effort, apache law claim that committer can volunteer > RM for any release. With this release EOL proposal passes and written into > hadoop bylaw, anyone want to call for a release which is EOL then she/he > have to provide a good reason to community and get voted before to start > release effort. We don't want to waste community time/resource to > verify/vote a narrow interested release. > > 3. About committer's responsibility, I think the bottom line is > committer should commit patch contributor's target release and her/his own > interest release which I conservatively agree with Allen's point that this > vote doesn't change anything. But if a committer want to take care more > interest from the whole community like most committers are doing today, > he/she should understand which branches can benefit more people and could > skip some EOL release branches for backport effort. > > About major release EOL, this could be more complicated and I think we > should discuss separately. > > Thanks, > > Junping > ________________________________________ > From: Allen Wittenauer <a...@effectivemachines.com> > Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2017 3:30 PM > To: Chris Trezzo > Cc: common-...@hadoop.apache.org; hdfs-...@hadoop.apache.org; > yarn-dev@hadoop.apache.org; mapreduce-...@hadoop.apache.org > Subject: Re: [VOTE] Release cadence and EOL > > > On Jan 18, 2017, at 11:21 AM, Chris Trezzo <ctre...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > > Thanks Sangjin for pushing this forward! I have a few questions: > > These are great questions, because I know I'm not seeing a > whole lot of substance in this vote. The way to EOL software in the open > source universe is with new releases and aging it out. If someone wants to > be a RE for a new branch-1 release, more power to them. As volunteers to > the ASF, we're not on the hook to provide much actual support. This feels > more like a vendor play than a community one. But if the PMC want to vote > on it, whatever. It won't be first bylaw that doesn't really mean much. > > > 1. What is the definition of end-of-life for a release in the hadoop > > project? My current understanding is as follows: When a release line > > reaches end-of-life, there are no more planned releases for that > line. > > Committers are no longer responsible for back-porting bug fixes to > the line > > (including fixed security vulnerabilities) and it is essentially > > unmaintained. > > Just a point of clarification. There is no policy that says > that committers must back port. It's up to the individual committers to > push a change onto any particular branch. Therefore, this vote doesn't > really change anything in terms of committer responsibilities here. > > > 2. How do major releases affect the end-of-life proposal? For > example, how > > does a new minor release in the next major release affect the > end-of-life > > of minor releases in a previous major release? Is it possible to > have a > > maintained 2.x release if there is a 3.3 release? > > I'm looking forward to seeing this answer too, given that > 2.7.0 is probably past the 2 year mark, 2.8.0 has seemingly been in a > holding pattern for over a year, and the next 3.0.0 alpha should be RSN.... > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: yarn-dev-unsubscr...@hadoop.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: yarn-dev-h...@hadoop.apache.org > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: hdfs-dev-unsubscr...@hadoop.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: hdfs-dev-h...@hadoop.apache.org > > > > >
