On Tue, 2016-02-02 at 07:34 +0000, Niels Thykier wrote: [...] > > Greg's new policy is to pick the first Linus release in each year for > > longterm maintenance. The longterm branch for 2016 is based on Linux > > 4.4, released at the end of week 1 (10th January). By the time stretch > > is released, 4.4 will be quite old (the same problem squeeze and wheezy > > had, requiring many driver backports). > > > > Would you prefer that we moved future freezes (i.e. Buster and later), > so we could always rely on Greg's branch? Yes, I would. > Not knowing Linux's LTS planning: > > * Does Greg do an LTS *every* year? OR, He has done so every year since 2008, except for 2010. Following discussion at last year's kernel summit, he agreed to start an LTS branch from the first release of each year, which should be within the first 9 weeks of the year. [...] > @Kernel+d-i - What is your take on the following: > > * How long will it take to have the new release ready? > - That is, the latency between the 22nd and us having it in unstable. Usually we would upload a new upstream release to experimental and wait for at least the first stable update before uploading to unstable. That means a delay of about 3 weeks. But we could decide to take the risk of uploading early to unstable, even starting with release candidates to flush out bugs that will affect Debian users. > - How certain are we on the 22nd being the actual release date? I thought that 10 week cycles were rare, but I checked this and now I'm much less confident. Rounding to the nearest week, the distribution of release cycle lengths from 3.2 to 4.4 inclusive, is: 8 weeks: * ( 1) 9 weeks: ********** (10) 10 weeks: ********** (10) 11 weeks: ** ( 2) (I chose this range to exclude the 3.1 release delayed by the kernel.org compromise.) So it seems quite possible that 4.10 could be released later in January or in February. [...] > * How difficult/disruptive do you expect the migration to linux 4.10 > will be? > - Is this something we can reasonably do within a month? 2 months? Migration from what, 4.9? > - Can we plan ahead to reduce the time / issues? Maybe use > linux pre-releases? Yes, that's an option. Thanks to early integration testing (linux- next), Linux release candidates are less of a risk than they used to be. > - If we start this, is it in anyway reasonable to do a roll-back > within 2-3 weeks? (I am guessing "no", but I figured I'd ask.) I think it would be doable, but it would probably require the earlier kernel version to be re-uploaded as a new source package to satisfy dak. > * If we were to stick with 4.4, what we will be missing out on? > - Are there any planned/known "must haves"? Primarily hardware support - we would likely need to backport support for newer GPUs, Ethernet, wifi and SCSI controllers in PCs and for new ARM-based SoCs and platforms. > - How long does Greg's LTS last? We would spend at least a year of > it before January 22nd 2017. About 15 months. > > (By the way, I haven't seen the stretch freeze dates announced > > anywhere; I only found them on a wiki page. A new "Bits from the > > release team" seems to be overdue.) > > > > Ben. > > > > A bits is indeed overdue. The announcement happened in the Release Team > talk at DebConf15. Thanks. I knew I had seen dates somewhere, and that must have been where I saw them. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Albert Einstein
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