Hello!
During the last Eclipse Che Community Call, a topic was brought up regarding the current release schedule for major(7.x.0) & minor(bugfix .1, .2) releases. As of right now, releases happen every week on Wednesday, the major release occurs at the sprint end/start week, and bugfix releases .1 and .2 occur in the following weeks.
The suggestion from the Prod team is to refrain from releasing bugfix releases on this schedule and only perform them on-demand. Initially, we came up with the current frequent schedule to allow us to test new CI& release automation improvements. Now that we don't have a need for that anymore, we don't see much benefit in such cadence, and if anything, it could be a cause of unnecessary time spent on the shipping of release, that would serve no significant purpose. While release workflows are now automated (code tagging, building required artifacts&images, PR submission), there are still pieces that would require human interaction, such as validating PRs code and its various test (PR checks) results which could suffer for flakiness/outages.
So I'd propose to perform release on direct demand for a bugfix tagged version. An issue on GitHub should be created for such release, that way all required fixes will be communicated about, ensured that they're merged, tested, and shipped with a bugfix tag.
I can add that for downstream product CodeReady Workspaces, as we don't utilize those tags anyhow. One thing that was noted during the call is updates of plugin/devfile registry npm packages, although we could probably handle that with dist-tags for example.
We could start doing that immediately once the 7.42.0 version lands, that way the following weeks' releases .1 and .2 will not be performed unless specifically requested.
If anyone has any thoughts or other suggestions about release cadence change, please submit your feedback.
Thanks!
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