prep for 1.0.1

[Richard Laager]

On 02/21/2018 02:44 AM, Hal Murray wrote:
>> I'm a big fan of "always stable master" and time based releases.
> 
> I'd be happy with that.  What sort of interval did you have in mind for "time 
> based"?

I don't have one in mind. Looking at the history of releases, they tend
to be 1-4 months, with an average around 2.5 months. If you're going to
move to time-based, you might consider quarterly releases?

> Our master is generally pretty stable, but we don't have a solid test setup.  
> We can tell if it builds, but that doesn't guarantee that it will actually 
> work correctly.

I could argue this means you should release more often, so the deltas
are smaller. If someone finds a problem, it'll be sooner with a fewer
changes to bisect.

Longer release cycles allow developers and users of git to test some
changes longer, but that's only helpful if you have a freeze. If you
keep making new changes right up to release, then the later changes
still have very little testing.

> How much testing do you do and/or are you willing to do?

I make sure it compiles and runs on Debian and Ubuntu. I make sure the
output of `ntpq -p` looks sane. For new upstream releases, I would want
to run it on my systems for at least a few days before uploading and
eyeball the ntpviz graphs. Two of my servers are in the NTP pool, so
reviewing my server's statistics in the pool monitoring is another thing
I do. Those are far less granular than ntpviz, though.

When the package hits Debian, it goes in unstable for a while before it
migrates to testing, where it sits until the next stable release. So it
rolls out incrementally that way.

> Does it matter if our release schedule does or doesn't mesh well with yours?  

Not at all. Your schedule drives mine (for new upstream versions).
Packaging changes are independent, and I expect would be primarily
driven by users reports or other changes in the distro ecosystem. The
Debian distro (as a whole) release schedule is pretty much irrelevant,
other than freezes blocking new uploads. Ubuntu does time-based
releases, so there is some incentive for me to get any pending work in
before an impending freeze boundary, but that's about it.

-- 
Richard