[Qgis-psc] QGIS LTR release schedule

[Alexandre Neto]

Hello Andreas et al.

I almost forgot the plan to reducing the number of patch releases.

What I have been doing, even with monthly patch releases, is to test the LTR releases when they happen at the same time as a new stable release ( I believe that's when the major issues may arrise from possible dependency bumps). But we can try to make it on every month on the LTR patch releases if it's only for the extra 3 months.

Unfortunately, The test cases list is still not very big, and mainly limited by installation tests:

https://qgis.tenant.kiwitcms.org/plan/37/3-28-4-installation-smoke-tests <https://qgis.tenant.kiwitcms.org/plan/37/3-28-4-installation-smoke-tests>

It would be nicer if we can add specific tests for "dangerous" backports or bumps in dependencies, but we would need a tip from developers about it, as, at least for me, it's not always clear what could be the implications of each change.

To be honest, given the current packaging infrastructure, because there's no "testing freeze", and every LTR patch appears immediately on OSGeo4w, many users install the new LTR version before me or Giovanni have the chance to test it out.

By testing freeze, I mean a period, minimum 1 week, where there is no more bug fixing, packaging is done ( maybe only on osgeo4w?) and we can test the final artifacts before they are released to public. For this, those artifacts could not land on OSGeo4w LTR branch.

Without this period, the first manual tests, even if not organized, are always done by less patient users that are eager to install the new versions and automatically update the LTR.

Kind regards,

Alexandre Neto

On Tue Mar 7, 2023, 08:39 PM GMT, Andreas Neumann <mailto:andreas at qgis.org> wrote:
> Hi Alex and Giovanni,
>
> In today's PSC meeting the PSC discussed (again) the LTR release schedule, which was recently thinned out due to discussion on QEP 239 "Manual Testing on LTR Releases and Release Schedule", <https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/239> When we accepted the thinned out schedule for LTR, we did not have on the table that there is also a "quarantine" rule - that means that a backport should first go into the regular release where it is tested more broadly, before it can be backported to LTR. In worst case, there is a waiting period of about 4 months, until the backport ends up in LTR, because of the thinned out release schedule.
>
> We want to suggest yet another change in the schedule that the larger organizations, that start to look at an LTR usually after it passed the first three months, can still get regular monthly releases until we reached approx. the 3.xx.9 release. Then I think we can thin out the schedule as planned before.
>
[image]
>
> Alex and Giovanni: would you support that change? What additional resources or support would you need to handle this change with respect to manual testing?
>
> Thank you for your reply,
> Andreas
>
> --
> Andreas Neumann
> QGIS.ORG <http://QGIS.ORG> board member (treasurer)
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