[llvm-dev] Release plan for llvm 12 ?

[Eric Christopher via llvm-dev]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 5:59 PM Dimitry Andric via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> On 3 Dec 2020, at 21:00, Tom Stellard <tstellar at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 12/3/20 11:39 AM, Dimitry Andric wrote:
> >> On 3 Dec 2020, at 16:08, Tom Stellard via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On 12/3/20 2:16 AM, Jeroen Dobbelaere wrote:
> >>>> Just wondering. Is there already a plan for the llvm 12 release ?
> >>>
> >>> Not yet, but it should be roughly the same calendar days as LLVM 10.
> >> As an aside, I would like to mention that as a downstream consumer and
> tester, it sometimes felt a little annoying that the x.0.1 and (x+1).0.0
> releases often seemed to overlap. It would be great if there is an
> non-trivial time interval between such releases, to avoid having to
> integrate two versions downstream simultaneously.
> >
> > Would your ideal release schedule look like?
>
> Looking at the full releases list again, I see that I must have been
> remembering the 10.0.1 release in particular, because that was pretty close
> to 11.0.0. And both 10.0.1 and 11.0.0 were a bit later than previous
> releases.
>
> Historically, it seems major LLVM releases happen roughly every 6 months:
>
> 11.0.0: 2020-10-12
> 10.0.1: 2020-08-06
> 10.0.0: 2020-03-24
>  9.0.1: 2019-12-20
>  9.0.0: 2019-09-19
>  8.0.1: 2019-07-19
>  8.0.0: 2019-03-20
>  7.0.1: 2018-12-21
>  7.0.0: 2018-09-19
>  6.0.1: 2018-07-05
>  5.0.2: 2018-05-16
>  6.0.0: 2018-03-08
>  5.0.1: 2017-12-21
>  5.0.0: 2017-09-07
>  4.0.0: 2017-03-13
>  (it goes on in the same vein, even further back)
>
> The release dates before 10.0.0 appear to be fairly regular, e.g. major
> releases in March and September, followed by minor releases in July and
> December. So roughly a release every three months.
>
> I guess you can't always have extremely predictable dates, because of,
> well, unknown unknowns and such. :) But aiming for the cadence that we had
> from 4.0.0 through 9.0.1 would be nice.
>

For some context the number of patches going into llvm per
day/week/month/year has been growing steadily over time. This complicates
testing time and increases the odds that on any given day the source base
is going to be ok to release. A number of individuals and companies try to
keep top of tree as ready to release as possible, but that's not always in
the cards. This also explains the growing delay in recent years (this year
in particular) on time between releases even if we start on the same
cadence.

-eric
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