[systemd-devel] Bugfix release(s)

[Filipe Brandenburger]

So I think all the bits already exist somewhere and perhaps a small
change in naming would go a long way to make these pushes smoother.

If when we cut v240 from the master branch, we had called it v240-rc1
instead, perhaps it was clear that it could take some more testing
before it was made official.

Furthermore, fixes for the breakage were backported into the
v240-stable tree in systemd-stable repository, so perhaps calling the
top of that tree v240 (or v240.0) at some point would have been
helpful.

Having been pushing to systemd-stable this week (fixing one of the
CVEs in previous versions), I have to say that there's some impedance
to contributing to that tree, since I needed a separate fork (GitHub
doesn't want to let me do PRs from my main fork), sometimes it doesn't
build on the latest toolchain and libs (I'm working on fixing that
too), etc. Perhaps having some more of the distro maintainers actively
helping on those branches would be best. I think bringing those
branches into the main repo would help in those regards.

Why don't we try something slightly different for the v241 timeline?

At the time of the release, we actually create a new *branch* and call
it release-v241. We also tag v241-rc1 at the start of that tree and
announce the pre-release. (Note that this branch means no need for
v241-stable in systemd-stable anymore, so it's not a branch which
wouldn't have existed, it's only in a different place now.)

As distros start to do heavier and broader testing of that
pre-release, we start fixing bugs at trunk, backport them to
release-v241 and after a week or so release v241-rc2. Rinse and
repeat.

After things are stable for a couple of weeks, we can finally just
bump the version number, tag v241.0 and announce the final release.
Hopefully everything will go very smooth. But, if it doesn't, we can
still iterate on that and release v241.1. We can also release v241.2
to address the CVEs that come up a month later (just kidding, of
course there won't be any!)

>From a developer's point of view, this really doesn't look too painful
compared with the current process.

And distros will have an useful "almost ready" point where they have
time to do one-time testing and start pushing to some users to collect
feedback before the final "official" or "stable" release.

What do you all think?

Cheers,
Filipe
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