It may seem a short time since 18.03 “Impala” was released, but we’re approaching its successor already. According to the usual schedule, we will be forking 18.09 “Jellyfish” from master in about a month, then during September it will be stabilized, released around the end of that month, and maintained for the following half a year.
So, if you want some features in the next stable, now it’s the right time to polish them, so that they can make it in time. There’s a milestone on GitHub already, but I suppose it’s rather large now and will need to be cleaned up
The release will be managed by @samueldr and me = @vcunat (both handles are the same on GitHub and IRC, too).
How managers work was roughly described in the rfc and in a talk at the last NixCon, though I’ve been trying to shift much of the work to original authors of nixpkgs changes. It’s now me staying for 18.03 and 18.09, and Samuel starting with 18.09.
So exciting to hear that, it is incredible to see the NixOS community work and this is no exception. I look forward to a great release and an amazing Jellyfish. Thank you so much @vcunat and @samueldr, I know you will both do an excellent job!
On the other side: Does this mean that 18.03 hits EOL? I’m asking
because I’m on a sabatical (until early 2019) and have very slow
internet and only every two weeks or so - running an update from 18.03
to 18.09 would probably take … weeks to download!
That’s why it would be really nice if at 18.03 would not hit EOL right
then…
Having low-maintenance mode where only the kernel and critical stuff
like openssl would be updated would be really nice
As usual, 18.03 will have standard support at least one month past 18.09 release date (i.e. during October), and AFAIK people have been trying to put highly critical fixes even for a few more months (though I’ve seen no promises on this second part yet).
Lets hope someone steps up. Support until February would be nice, the
only things I care about security-wise would be kernel, openssl, gpg,
… cannot think of more right now. It’s a personal device after all,
not a server or something like that.
August 30th, what a wonderful day. Some would think it’s one day from the branch-off, others argue that it’s two. Turns out this time it’s three days from the branch-off moment.
After coordinating with @vcunat, we have decided to do the branch-off no later than 20:00 UTC on Sunday, September 2 2018-09-02T20:00:00Z.
It’s a tad bit late, but not impossible to get your PR merged if it’s new, hasn’t been reviewed, or you have been fixing the last minute things upon it. I’ll come to regret it later, but if you think it’s crucial it’s considered for 18.09, don’t hesitate to ping us release managers, as you probably already would have.
Official announcement is expected today. You can certainly use 18.09 already, we’re just waiting for someone with permissions to update the web and similar nitpicks.
I actually haven’t done much for this release. Quite a bunch of people have fixed quite a lot of errors, and Samuel’s done most of the “manager” stuff.
They are planned for NixCon. I don’t have any numbers at hand, really. There are various public tools that may give you a rough idea; on the whole I feel the contributor activity still rising a bit. Well, the 40 PRs merged per day is huge by itself (average of the last month).
