[Evergreen-dev] Can we make 3.11.7 the last 3.11 release?

[Jason Stephenson]

Hi, all.

First: I want to make it clear that I am speaking for myself as a core 
committer and sometimes builder of releases. The sentiments below DO NOT 
represent those of my employer, C/W MARS, Inc.

On 7/18/24 09:36, Jane Sandberg via Evergreen-dev wrote:
> Hi Jeremy,
> 
> That's a good point.  In practice, we recently did a security release 
> for 3.10, despite the fact that it was technically 5 months past its 
> official security EOL.  To me, it sounds like a good discussion topic 
> for a future dev meeting 
> <https://wiki.evergreen-ils.org/doku.php?id=dev:meetings>, would you be 
> interested in putting it on an agenda and introducing the topic, Jeremy?

I think it would be a good topic for a dev meeting if more people would
show up to discuss things.

We seem to be in a cycle of discussing things, coming to a consensus,
doing well for a while, and then things slow down or falter after some
time.

> 
> I haven't heard anybody say that they need more bug fix 3.11 releases 
> after this one, so we're currently building 3.11.7 with the assumption 
> that it will be the last bugfix release in the series, and that it will 
> be security-only after this.

I refrained from saying this earlier, but I think we do too many point
releases given the small number of people who usually participate in
making them.

My personal opinion is that we should do fewer bug fix releases (modulo
security updates) in order to encourage sites to upgrade more
frequently.

We should also have a serious discussion about discontinuing tarballs,
except possibly for major releases. My question here is how many sites
actually use them. I imagine that tarballs are mostly used by people
first coming to Evergreen to try it out. I do not know, however, and I'm
open to changing my mind if provided evidence that members of the
community do use the distribution archives for upgrades.

Part of the reason that we slipped from our previous schedule is that it
generally falls on the same group of volunteers to build, test, and
release the releases. We have gotten back on track because there has
been a push from the community to do so and some new people stepped up
to build the releases. (You know who you are, and we are all grateful to
you.) While there are different folks building the releases now, the
number of participants hasn't changed much. I worry that this momentum
can be sustained without a commitment of more people from the community
to help when they can. (I speak to committers in particular here.)

What we need is not a schedule, but a larger pool of willing
participants to make these things happen.

NB: It also helps to have someone pulling the strings/sending reminders
and organizing a group to work on the releases.

> 
> Thanks,
> 
>     -Jane
> 

Thank you, Jane and others for what you've been doing lately.

Sincerely,
Jason Stephenson