[systemd-devel] Bugfix release(s)

[Dave Reisner]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 10:59:06AM +0100, Jan Synacek wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> since v240 didn't go too well, I would like to suggest that the next one
> (preferably two) release(s) are bugfix only. Please, consider it.

systemd needs better release hygiene, not just a smattering of bugfix
releases. As a rolling release distro, we regularly find release-day
blockers. That's bad for everyone. v240 was particularly bad as 6 months
had elapsed since v239 (and over 3100 commits). That's the longest
timespan and most commits in any systemd release in its nearly 9 year
history.

It's my understanding that there were known problems that prevented
tagging the release of v240 sooner. If that's the case, most other
development should have *stopped* with focus on fixing those problems.
However, that doesn't appear to be the case. Looking at commit
timestamps over time, nearly half the commits were made in the last 2
months:

  Jun: 86
  Jul: 276
  Aug: 241
  Sep: 317
  Oct: 812
  Nov: 882
  Dec: 560

That doesn't seem right to me. Looking at this by week is pretty bad,
too:

  25: 4
  26: 82
  27: 31
  28: 23
  29: 84
  30: 104
  31: 85
  32: 85
  33: 8
  34: 66
  35: 40
  36: 35
  37: 121
  38: 61
  39: 91
  40: 91
  41: 255
  42: 240
  43: 179
  44: 94
  45: 181
  46: 255
  47: 209
  48: 271
  49: 209
  50: 164
  51: 105
  52: 1

Please bring back a regular release process (as dvdhrm attempted to do)
like curl which has a 2 month release cycle. They're actually *beating*
this 2 month period substantially, averaging 40 days between releases
over the last 30 releases (2+ years). They follow a 30 day period of
feature work with a 30 day period of bugfixes.

Yes, this is probably more work. But maintaining the systemd-stable repo
is work, too. Effort put into making releases cut from master more
stable is ideally offset by the lack of work that will need to go into
maintaining systemd-stable branches.

Please, let's make all future systemd release better, not just the next
1 or 2.

dR