Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
Hi, Well. This is probably the most active e-mail thread here on DRBD-user in a while. It is hard for me to give additional viable input to this thread. The policies of drbd-8.0 and 8.2 are published on the web page. The idea with drbd-8.2 is to follow the development model Linus has chosen for Linux-2.6. Add new features and keep it stable at the same time. This of course only allows new features that can be build on the current architecture. Regardint the argument that the userland api version or the wire protocol will become more out of sync between 8.0 and 8.2: During the 0.7 development it was always painfull to add something new, because our userland-kernel interface needed to change. Now we have an extensible interface, and over the last 18 month it really proved to work. Regarding the protocol 8.2 still talks to 8.0, and we will keep it that way. Upgrading from 8.0 to 8.2 (or downgrading) will stay an trivial task, and can be performed as "rolling upgrade". Regarding the time of support. As of today 8.0 will stay supported for about 4 Years from now. > > Well .. I'll give two real world examples. > > 1. A while back, there were (3) 8.0.x releases in a week that caused > issues. AFTER the 3rd bad release and after it was stable, those changes > were rolled into 8.2.x. None of the 8.0.x instability was seen in the > 8.2.x tree. > > The current 8.0.12 changes are not yet rolled into the 8.2.x branch, > 8.0.12 has been released for several weeks and being tested in real > life. If there were any showstoppers in the 8.0.12 code, it would be > fixed BEFORE it was rolled into 8.2.6, which is currently pending. > > These make 8.2.x seem good to me. > That is right, and we took that as reason to think about our release process. This was the trigger for us to have the release candidates (and an automated test suite internally). We learned our lession from that. Regarding drbd-0.7. We will officially end support for that with the end of October 2008. I am happy that drbd-8.2 is in CentOS. That the CentOS people decided to have it instead of 8.0 and not in addition to 8.0 is the decision of CentOS. As getting my salary from LINBIT I have to add that we also build RPMs of all releases -- but for our customers only. -Phil