I think using the YY.03 and YY.09 is fine. It’s just our preparation for the branchoff is awkward. In unstable essentially we want everything to be the latest, however, that’s not how a lot of ecosystems work. Most notably for this release: plasma.
We should really stabilize “core” packages around the ecosystems which support them. The systemd 246 bump systemd: 245.6 -> 246 by flokli · Pull Request #94354 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub caused two pretty serious regressions for the 20.09 release: NixOS Tests broken in master and staging · Issue #96197 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub and https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/98141. We should select the major blocking ecosystems (plasma, gnome) and work backwards in selecting their dependencies for qt, systemd, and other more “critical” packages. Since we’re shipping plasma 5.18.5, and gnome 3.36, both which were released early this year; we should have kept the version of systemd to something that would have been developed against. Not having to deal with the staging cycles around fixing systemd regressions would have saved 2-3 weeks.
We could “delay” the release to align with plasma and gnome schedules (release something in october), but this would give the plasma and gnome maintainers essentially no time to package and polish those ecosystems during stabilization.
For me personally, I took off quite a bit of time from work in September to help do ZHF and stabilize the release. And now that the schedule slipped into october, and I was expecting the release to have been cut, I don’t have as much free time to dedicate to nixpkgs. Also, I got burned out from reviewing PRs and fixing builds.
Anyway, this is getting off-topic. I’ll probably have a constructive thread on how we can align schedules of staging-next PRs to avoid cramming 500+ staging commits a few days before branch off https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/97146 Staging next by FRidh · Pull Request #96437 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub Staging next by FRidh · Pull Request #96280 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
This post wasn’t meant to be disparaging against anyone. Everyone in the nixos community is here by choice, and I don’t think I’ve seen another community with such high caliber of technical skill and passion. I’m coming from a place where I want to see NixOS succeed, and I think being accountable for timelines is necessary for larger adoption. However, we kind of set ourselves up for failure in doing stable releases, and the release date always suffers. Like I said above, I’ll have a separate thread on improving the timeline for doing a release, so that we have reasonable expectations.