Hi,
it would be great if we could decide soon when our next few major
releases will happen. This will allow:
- release managers to start allocating their shifts for early 2020;
- developers to organize their work; this particularly matters for
sponsor deliverables with deadlines.
The starting point is the release schedule that we inherit from
Mozilla:
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/calendar/
Here's an initial proposal, optimized towards minimizing the number of
major releases we have to do, while meeting our sponsor deadlines.
My goal here is that we identify bugs in this draft:
- 2019-10-22: Release 4.0 (major release)
- 2019-12-03: Release 4.1 (bugfix release)
- 2020-01-07: Release 4.2 (bugfix release, with one exception)
Tails Upgrader MUST support Endless automatic upgrades (#15281); if
it's not ready in time, instead ship that in a beta by the end of
January; and then some minor adjustments are needed below.
Automatic upgrade from 4.0 and 4.1, using the old upgrade system.
- 2020-02-11: Release 4.3 (bugfix release)
Automatic upgrade from 4.2, using the new upgrade system (but still
with aufs-based diff).
From now on, users of Tails << 4.2 must first automatically upgrade
to 4.2, before they can automatically upgrade to the current 4.x.
Alternatively, they can do a manual upgrade. UX will tell RMs which
of these options we should advertise.
- 2020-03-10: Release 4.4 (bugfix release)
Automatic upgrade from 4.2 and newer (still with aufs-based diff).
- 2020-03-21: potential emergency release that traditionally follows pwn2own
- end of March 2020: Release 4.5~rc1
MUST switch to overlayfs (#8415).
If GRUB and Secure Boot are ready to ship as well: awesome!
Otherwise, we'll need another major release by the end of July.
Automatic upgrade from 4.2 and newer (now with overlayfs-based diff).
- 2020-04-07: Release 4.5 (major release)
Automatic upgrade from 4.2 and newer (with overlayfs-based diff).
Is there any issue with this tentative plan?
Other factors that we should take into account?
Thanks in advance!
Known issues:
- I don't remember ever getting this right on first try :)
- Mozilla may change their release schedule. This will cause less
trouble than usual wrt. sponsor deadlines: MOSS folks will
understand if we have to shift our releases accordingly
and thus deliver something a little bit late.
- I did not reason about the timing of the Tails Installer changes
that the migration to GRUB will require. Worst case, we'll have to
make another exception and ship them in a bugfix release.
Cheers,
--
intrigeri
