[Opendnssec-develop] More on OpenDNSSEC versions... Support policy and 1.5 anyone?

[Sara Dickinson]

Hi All, 

In the team meeting last week we had some more detailed discussion about the impact of the change in versioning scheme as recently agreed. 

1. Support for older versions

The consensus was that a significant portion of the user community will stay on 1.3 for the foreseeable future and that we should consider declaring it a Long Term Support release (following the Ubuntu model).  

- It was proposed that in practice this would mean committing to providing support (i.e. bug fixes only) for 1.3 for at least 1 year after 2.0 is released (assuming 2.0 is the next LTS). 
- 1.4 and any other 1.X minor releases would be 'standard releases'. 
- Support for standard releases would be something like N months (6,12?) following the subsequent release.

I think it would be helpful to the users if we could clarify our support policy when we describe the versioning change with the 1.4 release. So the key questions are:
Q: Does everyone agree with the principle of making 1.3 a LTS release?
Q: Does anyone have a specific opinion on what support we should provide for our standard releases?


2. Should we plan a 1.5 release?

The timeline for 2.0 is currently uncertain and in particular I think the testing effort required is very hard to quantify. So with only bug fixes going into 1.4 under the new scheme, the question becomes whether we should actively plan a 1.5 release or focus solely on 2.0. 

A 1.5 release would probably consist of a number of minor developments e.g. 

https://issues.opendnssec.org/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20OPENDNSSEC%20AND%20labels%20%3D%20%221.5%3F%22%20ORDER%20BY%20assignee%20DESC

aimed at optimising existing functionality for users of 1.4 (several being based on user requests). As long as we effectively manage the scope then this kind of release should be straightforward to plan, test and release on a defined timescale e.g. 6 months. It would mean continued minor developments on the existing enforcer code that would then needed porting to 2.0 though. For what it is worth I believe a 1.5 release would provide value to 1.4 users for a relatively small overhead and mitigate a 'big bang' feel beyond 1.4. Feedback from the board is much appreciated on this :-)

Sara.