[ovs-dev] OVN release proposals 1/3: Semi-annual releases

[Mark Michelson]

For the past two years, OVN has had quarterly releases. This allowed for 
new features to be released more rapidly than if OVN were released at a 
slower pace. During 2021, there were two trends:

1) "Small" new features were less frequent. Most features that added in 
the past couple of years (e.g. incremental processing in ovn-controller, 
ovn-northd-ddlog, pluggable architecture, etc.) are large features that 
could benefit from longer development times.
2) A lot of newer development focuses on scalability and performance 
rather than adding bells and whistles.

For this reason, I propose the following: Let's switch from quarterly 
releases to semi-annual releases, like OVS does.

The upside is that releases will be easier to manage, and developers 
will have more lead time to develop larger features. In doing so, we 
would double our current soft-freeze and hard-freeze periods for releases.

The downside is that users will need to wait longer for new features to 
be released.

Please respond with your thoughts on this proposal.