Hi Telegraf Community,
tl;dr Telegraf would like to stop generating RC releases and move from quarterly releases to monthly releases. Read on…
We have two proposed changes we would like to collect feedback about. If you could read through the following and give us your thoughts:
Background
Since 2016, the Telegraf project has released 22 minor releases, 48 release candidates, and 79 bug fix releases. Based on feedback from the community and a desire to improve the overall process, the Telegraf team has the following two proposals:
1) Discontinuation of Release Candidates
First, the team wishes to discontinue the creation of release candidate (RC) releases. The initial RC contained the snapshot of the next minor release. Then all additional releases of a minor version only included bug fixes and no new features.
After talking to community members and observing new issues reports after minor releases, the bug reports and support conversations generated by the RC process are very low, and therefore the value to us and the community is not sufficient to continue producing them.
Going forward InfluxData wish to produce the following artifacts:
- Telegraf nightlies: Users have access to Telegraf nightlies to test new features and fixes. The nightlies include downloads for all the supported platforms and include both binaries and DEB and RPM downloads. We encourage users who have test environments or are willing to help test Telegraf to ensure these nightlies are in their environment.
- Pull request artifacts: As users submit pull requests in Telegraf, artifacts are attached to a comment that users can use to download, test, and validate fixes as part of the CI process. These have been hugely helpful in getting feedback on specific proposed changes and verifying behavior. If you would like to be included in testing artifacts for specific plugins (e.g.: be tagged in GitHub on PRs for MQTT input plugin enhancements) please submit your information on this form.
2) Move from Quarterly to Monthly Releases
The second proposal is to move our quarterly releases to monthly releases. The team has heard from our users to get new features out to users even faster. Currently, when a new feature is landed the feature is included in the next minor release, which at most could be 3 months away.
Going forward InfluxData wish to propose the following release process:
- Monthly releases: Once a month a new minor release is created, rather than the current four times a year. This would include updates to the Docker images as well.
- Bugfix releases: Rather than releasing three bug fixes every three weeks, bug fix releases (e.g. 1.22.1, 1.22.2) would be released as necessary between monthly minor releases. These would be released when a large number or high impact bug are fixed and need to be released. We would not expect to do this more than weekly.
We look forward to hearing from you about these release improvements and if you will find them useful.
Thanks!
