[Xcb] Thinking towards 7.6 katamari, including xcb

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 07:39:41PM +1100, Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 12:42:40AM -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
> > But, if doing 3 month releases of the whole server tree means that
> > we'll scare OSVs away from our project, then I wonder how they manage
> > the Linux kernel today. Is the three month cycle a nightmare there? Or
> > is it helping them?
> 
> OTOH, we are not the kernel.  OSVs currently throw large amounts of
> development time at the kernel because they know how it works and they
> expect that they have to put in that much work.
> 
> The sole motivation for this seems to be making driver maintainers'
> lives easier (which is no bad thing), and giving hardware vendors a
> shorter time-to-market for hardware enables.
> 
> It would be nice to see what the distros think about this, too.

For Ubuntu, it is more the timing and predictability of the releases
than their frequency.  If it were timed right, a 6-month cycle that
releases right before our feature freeze date would be about perfect.

But the problem is that what may be perfect for one distro may be too
early or too late for another distro.  This is where a 3-month cycle
could have some advantage.

We've seen some of this benefit in Intel's release cycle.  We get a
release N which is early in our development cycle, and another N+1 which
typically comes in well past feature freeze.  Since the difference
between N and N+1 is only 3 months, we could just ship N and not feel
guilty about it.  Or, if N+1 is mostly a bug-fix release, and in our own
testing we find it super solid, we can pull it in even really late
without feeling we're taking too big of a risk.

Bryce