[ovs-dev] May we delay ovn-21.09?

[Mark Michelson]

Hi everyone,

If you've paid attention to ovn commits lately, you'll know that we've 
been putting in a lot of performance improvements. At Red Hat, this is 
because we've been engaging our scale team to try to help us to figure 
out bottlenecks in OVN and try to fix problem areas we find. As a happy 
coincidence, OVN developers from outside Red Hat have also been 
submitting fantastic optimizations lately.

Currently, ovn-21.09's soft freeze is scheduled for the end of this week 
(13 August). However, the Red Hat scale team has scheduled time through 
3 September for running large-scale tests. This effectively means that 
if we delayed until then, we could put even more optimizations into 
ovn-21.09 than we could if we were to soft-freeze now.

If we were to delay soft freeze until 3 September, then that would mean 
branching 2 weeks from then (17 September) and then releasing 2 weeks 
after that (1 October). This puts us releasing more-or-less one month 
later than the published schedule in the repository.

If this sort of delay would cause issues for developers, users, or 
organizations, please speak up. If anyone has an issue with delaying the 
release, we won't do it. After all, we published expected release dates 
and have already drifted on this one by a week. It's entirely possible 
people are relying on OVN 21.09 to be released then.

Thanks,
Mark Michelson