Proposal for OpenBMC releases

[Brad Bishop]

> On May 21, 2018, at 1:07 PM, krtaylor <kurt.r.taylor at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In order for us to facilitate all member companies in the OpenBMC work planning process, I believe it is important for the project to adopt a formal release schedule. Release cycles allow member companies to plan on content being delivered, get a read on project priorities, and exchange design ideas on the best implementation. As with other projects, release dates would be fixed in time. If a feature didn't make the release cutoff, then it ships in the next release. This really helps drive prioritization of new functionality.
> 
> As Brad commented in the community call today, let's start off the proposal with aligning with the Yocto project releases plus some time for project testing/hardening. Yocto releases are every 6 months, around May-October[1], so if we allow for a month of freeze and testing, that would be OpenBMC releases every June-November. Since June is next month, I'd propose that we start planning now for the November release.
> 
> OpenBMC release ? November 2018
> 
> Questions:
> How do we number releases? do we want to code name them?

I would suggest/vote-for adopting Yocto/Poky/OE conventions here…
so 2.3 -> pyro, 2.4 -> rocko, etc.

> Do we want a stable branch/working branch organization?

I would think so.  Again I'd suggest/propose something similar to
Yocto/Poky/OE:

master
master-next
rocko
rocko-next
pyro
pyro-next

Perhaps we could skip the -next branches.

> How long does the project maintain a stable branch? n-1? n-2?

I’m not sure.  My gut reaction was, as many as the community is willing
to write patches against, test, and maintain.

Do you consider N to be master (dev branch) or the most recent release?
If the latter…I’d be happy to start with supporting just N.  We can
see about N-1, N-2 once we get a taste of supporting something other
than just master.

> Do we want project milestones for content proposal, code freeze and release?

Most definitely, IMO.

> 
> [1] https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Releases
> 
> Kurt Taylor (krtaylor)