[libvirt] libvirt stable releases

[Eric Blake]

On 04/26/2012 12:39 PM, Cole Robinson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> An idea we've kicked around for awhile in Red Hat/Fedora land is doing
> official libvirt stable releases, but nothing ever took shape. The idea was
> brought up again recently and I've offered to help get something going.
> 
> I've pushed an upstream v0.9.11-maint branch with a bunch of patches
> cherry-picked to libvirt 0.9.11. Shortly I'll be cutting a 0.9.11.1 and
> pushing it to the website, like other releases.

How often do you plan to cut releases on the current maint branch?  Once
a month or so?

What's the preferred method for marking a patch as a candidate for
inclusion on the branch?

Right now, it looks like we are using cherry-pick -x to populate the
branch; maybe someday it would be worth swapping over to the style used
by the kernel where you base candidate patches directly off the stable
branch, then merge the branch into master for development, so that
master is always a superset of all commits in stable; but that implies
using a merge paradigm whereas our current style is that mainline is
linear history.  Food for thought, but certainly not anything worth
changing right away until we have more experience with how popular the
stable branch turns out to be.

> 
> Why 0.9.11? Because that's what we will be shipping in Fedora 17 :) Typically
> our policy with fedora is to stick with one libvirt version for the length of
> a release. Cutting stable releases should save us from having to backport
> patches, and hopefully get us more bug fixes than backporting only what our
> users report.  So I don't plan on doing a similar branch for 0.9.12 or 0.9.13,
> but will probably do a branch in 6 months time for whatever libvirt version we
> are shipping in Fedora 18.
> 
> While my primary motiviation at the moment is making Fedora maintenance
> easier, I hope that other distros will use the stable releases as well, where
> we can all benefit from each others QA and attention.
> 
> Any feedback appreciated!

Seems like a nice idea; it will be interesting to see who else picks up
on it.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake at redhat.com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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