Release roadmap? When should we expect 18.xx release?

[Hannu Nyman]

Have the devs reached any consensus about the next major release and the 
roadmap toward it?

It is now over a year from the 17.01 branching, and the original 17.01.0 was 
released in late February 2017. The stable 17.01 branch starts to feel old at 
some points, especially regarding packages, so it would be great to have the 
next major release out. Also, the 17.01 is branded LEDE, which may sound 
dubious to some Openwrt purists. (There was also some talk about a 
maintenance release for the ancient 15.05, but that sounds rather pointless.)

The merger has now happened at the source repo level, although it is 
incomplete at some other points. But from source code perspective, I do not 
think that there are that many roadblockers against the next major release.

There was active discussion in October 2017 about the next release with 4.9 
and/or 4.14 kernels, but that was already four months ago. And I am not sure 
if any final conclusion was reached. To me it sounded like a mixed 4.9/4.14 
release could be possible. Discussion e.g. at thread starting at 
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/lede-dev/2017-October/009186.html

Personally I see a 4.4/4.9/4.14 mix quite ok, as the main point is to offer a 
recent stable platform for the vanilla users. Due to the volunteer work for 
target and package maintenance, it will always be really hard to have all 
platforms unified at the same kernel release. The key is to have the major 
targets at a stable situation.

And from packages perspective, there is not much effort in backporting new 
package versions to the stable branch, thus the stable branch gets left 
behind rather soon after the release.

One of the original goals of LEDE forking was to get away from the slow 
timescale of a really major release in every 2 years, and into a much quicker 
release process. There was supposed to be a 17.06 release (as described in 
the LEDE release roadmap in wiki history: 
https://lede-project.org/releases/17.01/start?rev=1487176358 ), but that got 
trampled over by the merger discussions, and then the prolonged merger 
process further slowed things down. 17.01.4 alleviated the "stable release" 
problem a bit, but the underlying 17.01 branch is getting old in any case.

So, hopefully the devs can define a release roadmap and the next major 18.X 
release gets branched soon.