[sos-devel] SOS release planning

[Bryn M. Reeves]

Hi Sandro,

Thanks for your interest in the sos release schedule. We discuss and
coordinate these things primarily through issues/PRs on GitHub, as
well as the internal and external (Freenode) IRC channels.

It's a good idea to join these if you're interested in the latest
news about upcoming sos releases.

You can also reach the entire sos team at Red Hat (rather than just
me - I only handle upstream these days), by using the alias:

  sos-team at redhat.com

On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 04:00:28PM +0200, Sandro Bonazzola wrote:
> I see SOS 3.7 has been planned for October 15, 2018 according to
> https://github.com/sosreport/sos/milestone/9

Those are just rough estimates: as you know, historically sos has released
according to the RHEL schedules. We began a move away from that and toward
timed (six monthly) releases last year but it's still in the early days,
and we have a way to go before we are producing regular, timely releases
in this model.
 
> I also see that Fedora 29 GA has been planned for 2018-10-23 according to
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/29/Schedule
> This leaves 8 days from Fedora build of sos 3.7 and the GA.

It's still nearly six months away: we can work to accommodate your
needs for this release.
 
> Giving that sos 3.6 was planned for 2018-04-18 according to
> https://github.com/sosreport/sos/milestone/8 while Fedora 28 was planned

Actually this is already a slip of two weeks from the original planned
date: back in March, our colleagues in CEE began a wide ranging review
of sos data collection needs and gaps and this has generated a very
large backlog of "RHELevant" PRs for us to get through.

Since when I asked none of the distribution maintainers were especially
desperate for a new release to package we took the decision to slip the
3.6 release and to try to get as many of those requests in before we
make the release (as there's still plenty of time until the final 7.6
deadline).

> Looking at 3.6 planning at https://github.com/sosreport/sos/milestone/8,
> already delayed by 23 days with still 14 issues open, I would also suggest
> to reconsider either 3.6 release date or push out the issues to 3.7 and
> release 3.6 ASAP.

Actually those numbers are a bit off base: we do not have lots of
time or people to spend triaging pulls so unless the submitter adds
a release target, or a reviewer adds one, that query is going to be
a bit misleading.

There are 56 outstanding pull requests at the current time: I hope
to have cleared most of these by the end of the month.

For RHEL8 Pavel is currently building a snapshot of the upstream
tree. This will be replaced with the final release before the freeze.

If you need something in order to package for Fedora then please
just let us know: in the past we did these for Ubuntu if there was
a need and it would be very easy for us to re-introduce this for
Fedora.

I guess it's too late for the f28 freeze now but we keep the tree
in a releasable state and we could have released 3.5.1 at any time
in the last few months if it had been requested.

If you'd like to do a post-release update for Fedora 28 then of
course we can make a new point release for that.

Kind regards,
Bryn.