[CentOS] EL 6 rollout strategies? (Scientific Linux)

Mon May 16 22:54:47 UTC 2011
Gordon Messmer <yinyang at eburg.com>

On 05/15/2011 07:00 PM, Ron Blizzard wrote:
> So, when you take 5.6 out of the mix (taking into account the three
> releases at once), the average time from Red Hat 5.x release to CentOS
> 5.x release is 41.5 days. And 5.5 was 44 days. Your point?

There is a general trend toward longer delays between upstream and 
CentOS releases, with occasional anomalies of *extremely* long delays. 
That is the point.

> Up until
> 5.6 the longest it took for a CentOS 5.x release was 69 days, 5.4 took
> 49 days and 5.5 took 44 days. Is that going up or down?

 From the beginning of the series?  Generally longer.

> Take 5.3 out
> of the mix (as well as the three-release 5.6) and you've got an
> average of 36 days.

And all of 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6 have taken longer than that.

> Just barely over a month. Even with 5.3 it
> averages about a month and a half. 5.6 (and 5.3) were the aberrations,
> not the average. Thanks for the figures. They don't prove your point.

I think they do.  Even when you cherry-pick the data as you did.

Tell you what: Plot the release delays on a graph using the release as 
the X axis and the delay as the Y axis.  Based on that graph, plot the 
trend of the data.  Even if you exclude the outlying data, I can't 
imagine a way to honestly plot a trend that isn't growing.

>> I can't even begin to comprehend the logical failure behind the idea
>> that because SL and CentOS are keeping up with each other that CentOS is
>> not getting worse.  Again, Dag interjected only to ask why any
>> reasonable person would expect 6.1 to take only one month when 5.6 took
>> three.  The fact that there is a general trend toward longer release
>> delays supports that question.
>
> Again, three releases at once.

For certain definitions of "at once".  Upstream 6.0 was released in 
November.  5.6 was release about 2 months later, and work on C6 was 
stopped in order to get 5.6 out.  4.9 was out about a month after that. 
  CentOS was, as far as we know, working on 4.9 and 5.6 at the same 
time, but not on 6.

Moreover, for the near future, there will continue to be multiple 
releases from upstream within a couple of months of each other.  Is 
there any rational basis on which we should expect that the CentOS 
releases will no longer take several months under the same conditions 
that they've been faced with?