[Nix-dev] Stable NixOS releases

[Peter Simons]

Hi Eelco,

 > It would be good to have stable releases that get bug fixes for a
 > certain amount of time. For instance, we could make a stable release
 > every 3 months or so, named (Ubuntu-style) <year>.<month>, e.g. 13.06,
 > 13.09, and so on.

let me try to translate this goal into actions that need to be taken in
order to achieve it:

 1) At the beginning of every quarter, we create release branches
    'nixos-yyyy.mm' and 'nixpkgs-yyyy.mmm' from the current 'master'
    branch of the respective repository.

 2) We create Hydra jobsets that build the desired artifacts (binary
    package cache, Install CD, EC2 AMIs, etc.) for those release
    branches.

 3) Whenever a change is committed to 'master' that qualifies as an
    important but un-intrusive update, we propagate that change to all
    active release branches.

Now, steps (1) and (2) are easy.

Step (3) is hard, because it's an on-going effort that someone needs to
pay attention to constantly. Also, propagating changes from master into
the release branch can be difficult, because the commits in question may
depend on previous changes in 'master' that we don't want to propagate.

Does that sound right?

Take care,
Peter