[ovs-discuss] time for another LTS?

Ben Pfaff blp at ovn.org
Fri Oct 19 15:23:37 UTC 2018


On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 11:48:07AM +0000, Stokes, Ian wrote:
> > On 10/18/2018 10:46 PM, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> > > I've had a number of queries from folks lately about our roadmap for
> > > LTS releases.  It has, indeed, been a long time since we've had a
> > > long-term support release (the current LTS is 2.5).  Usually, we've
> > > done LTS releases before some kind of big architectural change, etc.,
> > > and so we've had no real internal pressure within the project to do it
> > > for a while.  But it might be a good signal to the community to bring
> > > the LTS release forward.
> > >
> > > What does everyone think about making the next (2.11) release an LTS?
> > >
> > 
> > I think it's a good idea. The current LTS is quite old now, especially for
> > the DPDK datapath. There is a new DPDK LTS coming out in November which
> > should be in for OVS 2.11, so it would be a nice combination for a user to
> > have LTS support for both.
> 
> +1
> 
> With regards backporting support for LTS releases, I take it LTS takes priority over non LTS branches, that would be the only difference I would think?

Yes, basically we should try harder to backport to LTS branches.

> In fairness I think the community is pretty good as is for backporting
> bug fixes for all branches.

We do a pretty good job of it most of the time.  The main driver for LTS
releases has been big OVS internal changes that are likely to break
things.  By doing an LTS release just before a version with those kinds
of changes, we gave our users something to confidently fall back on if
the next release was a little more unstable--not that we ever aim for
that, but it happens sometimes.  We haven't had that kind of big change
recently, so we haven't had a natural impetus to release an LTS--and for
the same reason, it's been easy to backport most fixes because there
haven't been sweeping changes across the tree.


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