[RFC 0080] Change NixOS releases to YY.05,YY.11 #80
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Another benefit of that would be that the stabilization period wouldn't clash so much with the exam phases (at my university at least). |
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I will write up another one for proposing a change to the ZHF schedule, but those changes are more controversial and didn't want to combine the two, as it would increase the "surface area" of changes greatly. |
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This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/release-schedule-for-nixos/3149/11 |
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I nominate myself for shepherd and/or shepherd leader. |
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Happy to shepherd this one to speed it up. |
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Everyone, please self nominate as shepherd. We want to get this through as quickly as is reasonable so we can minimize uncertainty. |
rfcs/0080-nixos-release-schedule
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| The 21.03 release will be delayed until 21.05, and the current 20.09 release | ||
| will be supported until June 2021. After the initial 21.05 release, all subsequent |
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Specifying the exact time 20.09 is supported until is a change of policy. The current policy is to keep the previous release supported for 1 month after the next release.
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This is in regards to https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/unstable/release-notes.html#sec-release-20.09 in which we say April of 2021
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| By changing our release dates to follow those of certain upstream projects, | ||
| we could reduce the amount of issues we encounter during stabilization. | ||
| In particular, GNOME and KDE Plasma both have a release in October, which |
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GNOME 3.38 released on September 16, we only merged it on October 24 and that included only rough testing by the GNOME packagers team (all core apps start and we did not experience any serious issues when running GNOME session). It was merged to master on November 10, which allowed wider user base to start testing this.
That revealed a serious regression that GNOME maintainers were not able to reproduce as of yet. With this proposal, a branch-off would be somewhere around the end of October so I doubt the delay will be enough to produce a well tested and stable release.
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historically, the branch-off was done in the middle of the month, so 20.03 I think was around the ~14th (but this had hydra evaluation issues which I think caused around a week delay), for 20.09 it was the beginning of the second second week, so I think around the 7th. And the target release date is usually on the last week of the month. What I'm trying to say is that even if we had a branch-off of November 10th, that's inline with the current process.
I have another RFC proposal (which I am in the process of creating) which would create a schedule for doing the desktop manager tasks before ZHF. Remember that the majority of the work for GNOME 3.38 was done while ZHF was still going on, and efforts were divided. If we have a few weeks were the community is focused on packaging plasma and gnome, I don't think the time to package them will be so long.
Also, organizing the effort with materials for people to "onboard" onto the effort helps a lot, something like NixOS/nixpkgs#101964 where I wrote up how to go about doing the fixes, and then tracked the overall progress of the effort. Looks like NixOS/nixpkgs#98316 was largely done with only the efforts of 4 people, I don't think it's unreasonable that we can get double that if we made it easy for people to know how to contribute.
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I fixed the release month from October to September (not sure why I put October).
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@jtojnar Would it perhaps be possible to start the GNOME packages update a few weeks before release based on the (at that time) current development versions?
Would that make the bump of the actual release small enough to allow for a tighter window?
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Last few cycles we actually started packaging when beta was released. The updates themselves are mostly automated so the biggest time sink is going through all the changelogs. We eventually want to have a nixpkgs branch tracking git HEADs of all the GNOME packages but need a tooling first – with unreleased code, we do not have the benefit of curated changelogs.
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Happy to help with this one. I'd like to nominate myself as a shepherd. |
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This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/20-09-release-retrospective/9851/30 |
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This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-should-stable-nixos-prioritize/9646/77 |
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This RFC is now in discussion with @ryantm, @domenkozar and @garbas as shepherds. @ryantm Do you want to be shepherd leader on this one? |
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Thank you, @edolstra. I accept being the shepherd leader. It looks like the one concern raised so far is by @jtojnar that the delay will not be enough to get GNOME ready (which is a major reason for this RFC). It seems like @jonringer has answered that he still intends branch off to be around the time when GNOME was merged into master on the last cycle. In the interest of limiting uncertainty in the community about release dates, I will lead this shepherd team as quickly as is allowed by the RFC rules (but not any quicker). I motion for the Final Comment Period (FCP) to begin with disposition to merge. @domenkozar @garbas please either approve or disapprove of the motion as soon as you can. I understand this is a bit fast, and I won't mind if you disapprove. |
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Squashed fixup commits, and added |
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I approve for FCP. Anything that makes releasing easier is a good step forward. We don't know the unknowns that come up with releases in May/November, but then we can make another shift if needed (hopefully not). |
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@garbas Could you please approve or disapprove of my motion to move to FCP with disposition to merge? |
I think unstable + ZHF will do enough to stabilize releases for most production users regardless of timeline. The main issue is trying to provide a decent desktop experience. And seeing as how it is usually the biggest unknown going into a release, we should try to minimize it as much as possible; which is the goal of this RFC. At the very least, it should be better than current release schedule. One other thing we could do is also define release criteria, and that should go a long way to determining what we prioritize, but I don't think anyone will disagree that we should have usable graphical installers and the related desktop managers should work as expected as well. |
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I'm also in favor to move this to FCP. I don't see any drawbacks, except minor inconveniences. |
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We are now in the Final Comment Period (FCP). Unless any major objections are raised, this will be accepted and merged in 10 days from now, on December 15th! Please post any final comments on this pull request. |
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This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-should-stable-nixos-prioritize/9646/78 |
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This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/21-05-call-for-release-manager/10204/8 |
Timeline was changed due to NixOS/rfcs#80 Signed-off-by: Jonathan Ringer <jonringer117@gmail.com>
The NixOS 21.03 release has been delayed to 21.05. See NixOS/rfcs#80. There are two instances of 21.03 which have been left as is, since they are in stateVersion comparisons. This will ensure that existing user configurations which refer to 21.03 will continue to work.
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This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/21-05-call-for-release-manager-and-release-members/10204/17 |
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This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/21-05-has-been-released/13407/1 |
There was a few unstable releases with 21.03pre, which would fall under this release. Schedule was changed as part of NixOS/rfcs#80 Signed-off-by: Jonathan Ringer <jonringer117@gmail.com>
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This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/rfc-0094-fcp-use-matrix-for-official-chat/14631/1 |
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This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-should-stable-nixos-prioritize/9646/81 |
This is meant to help minimize risk and work during the release stabilization period, by selecting a better time to branch-off from unstable.
Adapted from 8a3ba49
Related discussions:
cc @worldofpeace @garbas @FRidh
rendered: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/blob/ca06bb8dbb245f6a4c00311967e37753cd3d691a/rfcs/0080-nixos-release-schedule.md