[Oisf-users] New Suricata release model

[Victor Julien]

Hi all,

As the team is back from a very successful week in Barcelona, I’d like
to take a moment on what we discussed and decided on with regards to
development.

One thing no one was happy with is how the release schedules are
working. Releases were meant to reasonably frequent, but the time
between major releases was growing longer and longer. The 2.0 branch for
example, is closing in on 2 years as the stable branch. The result is
that many people are missing out on many of the improvements we’ve been
doing. Currently many people using Suricata actually use a beta version,
of even our git master, in production!

What we’re going to try is time based releases. Pretty much releases
will be more like snapshots of the development branch. We think this can
work as our dev branch is more and more stable due to our extensive QA
setup.

Of course, we’ll have to make sure we’re not going to merge super
intrusive changes just before a release. We’ll likely get into some
pattern of merge windows and (feature) freezes, but how this will
exactly play out is something we’ll figure out as we go.

We’re going to try to shoot for 3 of such releases per year.

In our redmine ticket tracker, I’ve also created a new pseudo-version
‘Soon’. Things we think should be addressed for the next release, will
be added there. But we’ll retarget the tickets when they are actually
implemented.

Since it’s already almost 2 years since we’ve done 2.0, we think the
next release warrants a larger jump in the versioning. So we’re going to
call it 3.0. The first release candidate will likely be released today
hopefully followed by a stable in December.

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Victor Julien
http://www.inliniac.net/
PGP: http://www.inliniac.net/victorjulien.asc
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