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<p>This all seems reasonable to me and I'm in favor of moving
forward with this plan.</p>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/13/19 9:59 AM, Ricardo Signes
wrote:<br>
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">Hey, remember last
month when <a
href="https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/pipermail/cyrus-devel/2019-November/004509.html"
moz-do-not-send="true">I asked about releasing Cyrus v3.2</a>?</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">That thread had
some more conversation about what needs to get done before
v3.2, and I wanted to come back to it and turn some things on
their head.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">Right now, we’re
talking about Cyrus releases being feature-bound. “We’ll
release v3.2 when feature X is done.” I think we’re not being
well-served by that. As feature X is delayed (for various
reasons that we can’t easily eliminate), it doesn’t just delay
the feature, but also all the other minor bugfixes and
optimizations that we’ve made in the master branch. Also, it
sets up the idea that we delay releases for the sake of fixes,
instead of releasing the fixes that are ready.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">That is: every
additional criteria for a new release is another doorway to
delay. Instead of opening those doors, I would rather try to
eliminate all of them.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">I propose that
instead of tying releases to milestones, we tie them to the
calendar. For the sake of full disclosure: I am modeling this
suggestion on <a href="https://metacpan.org/pod/perlpolicy"
moz-do-not-send="true">the release cycle of perl</a>, which
I ran for several years. I found the process more than
satisfactory, then.</p>
<ol style="margin: 1.2em 0px;padding-left: 2em;">
<li style="margin: 0.5em 0px;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;margin: 0.5em 0px
!important;">A new <em>unstable release</em> of Cyrus is
made every month. We promise only that it compiled and
passed the Cassandane test suite on the release manager’s
computer. It might contain regressions from previous
unstable releases, it might have crashers or corruptors.
We try to avoid any of these, but the goal here is a
snapshot for easy month-to-month testing. These are the
odd-middle-digit releases. (3.3.x)</p>
</li>
<li style="margin: 0.5em 0px;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;margin: 0.5em 0px
!important;">A new <em>major release</em> of Cyrus is
made every year. We will have tested it on as many
configurations as we can readily test. We will have, some
time before the release, frozen the branch for risky
changes, to reduce churn. In the meantime, new work lives
in feature branches. (The changelogs from each unstable
release provide a good basis for the whole-year
changelog!) These are the even-middle-digit
third-digit-zero releases. (3.4.0)</p>
</li>
<li style="margin: 0.5em 0px;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;margin: 0.5em 0px
!important;">A new <em>maintenance release</em> of Cyrus
is made for the last two stable releases when there are
enough fixes to critical bugs to warrant it. These are the
even-middle-digit third-digit-nonzero releases (3.4.1)</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">For the above to
work, some more properties need to be maintained.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">Maintenance
releases should be no-brainers to install, so they must only
fix regressions, crashers, security vulnerabilities, and the
like. This means that once you’re on 3.4.0, you can always
upgrade within the 3.4 series with a minimum risk. It also
means you get no optimizations, features, and the like.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">Major releases must
clearly document any incompatible changes or upgrade steps
required. Because non-regression bugfixes aren’t backported,
we want everyone to be able to upgrade from major release to
major release, so incompatible changes must be kept to a
minimum.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">In part, this is
just “don’t kill off a feature people use just because it’s a
little annoying.” The more important one is “don’t introduce
half-baked things that might need to change,” because people
will come to rely on them before you get the updates finished.
For features that will require multiple years to get right,
they have to go behind a default-off configuration option. I’d
strongly suggest they all have a uniform substring like
“unstable”. That way, when a complaint comes in that the
behavior of JMAP calendaring has changed, we can reply, “well,
to use it, you had to turn on the unstable_jmap_calendaring”
option.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">If we go with this
policy, we’ll need to…</p>
<ol style="margin: 1.2em 0px;padding-left: 2em;">
<li style="margin: 0.5em 0px;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;margin: 0.5em 0px
!important;">identify what issues are <em>blockers</em>
to v3.2.0, meaning they’re regressions from v3.0 and would
reasonably prevent someone from upgrading; this does <em>not</em>
include all known bugs, since they may be bugs that
already exist in the last stable release!</p>
</li>
<li style="margin: 0.5em 0px;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;margin: 0.5em 0px
!important;">pick a release target for v3.2.0; I will
arbitrarily suggest March 2 as “not too far off, but far
off enough that we can get things in order”; also, if
you’re American, March 2 is 3/2 ;-)</p>
</li>
<li style="margin: 0.5em 0px;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;margin: 0.5em 0px
!important;">produce a changleog, and especially identify
what changes in master need documentation as “incompatible
changes”</p>
</li>
<li style="margin: 0.5em 0px;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;margin: 0.5em 0px
!important;">produce a list of changes in master that
should be put behind an unstable configuration option and
then do it</p>
</li>
<li style="margin: 0.5em 0px;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;margin: 0.5em 0px
!important;">decide when to stop merging
non-release-related things to master</p>
</li>
<li style="margin: 0.5em 0px;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;margin: 0.5em 0px
!important;">make a plan for who will do monthly snapshot
releases</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">I’ve spoken with
ellie and Bron about just a few of these, such that I don’t
think it’s all crazy. (ellie notes, correctly, I think, that
the first set of releases like this will be the hard ones,
where we work out things like “how do we keep track of
incompatibilities, upgrade steps, and also how do we make
snapshots dead easy to release.”) If there’s general
agreement, I am definitely ready to pitch in and help try to
make it work!</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">—<br>
rjbs</p>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Ken Murchison
Cyrus Development Team
Fastmail US LLC</pre>
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