[Mageia-dev] Release cycles proposals, and discussion

[Renaud MICHEL]

Hello
On Sunday 12 June 2011 at 22:46, Michael Scherer wrote :
> To simplify the discussion, the proposals are all based on the fact that
> 2 or 3 releases could be supported at a time. We could have different
> schemes for that ( LTS every X release ( ubuntu ), different level of
> support ( mandriva )), but as this is a slightly different discussion,
> let's assume 2 supported releases for now, and let's discuss later for
> that ( ie next week, once this one is finished )
> 
> And roughly, to start the discussion, we have 3 potential releases
> cycles, based on all inputs we had :
> 
> Proposal 1: 
> 6 months release cycle -> 12 months life cycle
> ( Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva < 2010.1 && Mandriva != 2006.0 )
> 
> Proposal 2: 
> 9 months release cycle -> 18 months life cycle  
> ( ~ opensuse and the one we used for Mageia 1 )
> 
> Proposal 3: 
> 12 months release cycle -> 24 months life cycle
> ( Mandriva > 2010.1 )

From a long time mandriva (and now mageia) user POV, for myself I was quite 
fine with 6 month release cycle, but at work I'd rather not update too 
frequently and same goes for the rest of the family who generally don't care 
much for newer versions. And I know that for some people, a big upgrade 
every 6 month is a lot of work (and skipping a release is more risky).

So I think either proposal #2 or #3 would do, my preference depending on how 
much could be backported to the latest stable release.
What I mean is, if it is possible to have backports of newer releases for 
big projects, like KDE (and other DEs), libreoffice, firefox, samba 
(important at work), ..., then I am fine with a 1 year release cycle of 
proposal #3.

If the maintainer of such big projects (especially the DEs) think it would 
be too hard to backports newer versions to the 8-10 months old stack of the 
latest stable release (as I have seen recently such discussions on KDE MLs), 
then I would prefer proposal #2 to not be lacking behind too much.

cheers
-- 
Renaud Michel