[SOLVED] What's the lifecycle for enterprise vs no-subscription vs test releases?

[aj@root]

How do the release schedules differ between the 3 tiers and what are the qualifications for features or packages moving through them?

For example:
- do critical security fixes release in all simultaneously?
- is the time between releases in test and no-subscription measured in installs or days or weeks or months or bugfixes?
- how about between no-subscription and enterprise?

We want to be able to confidently speak to the advantages of the enterprise subscription, and to have the best qualitative and quantitative information available to do so.

I imagine that there's some level of "it depends", but I also imagine that there are some general minimums along "the happy path" - which is what I'm most interested in.

References

I've looked at the no-subscription/pvetest documentation and the lifecycle documentation for release details, and did a general search in the forums, but didn't find an answer.
- https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html#_repositories_in_proxmox_ve
- https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-ve-support-lifecycle.35755/page-2

I'm also aware that that many features are posted in Sticky Threads and general Announcements as they move through the pipeline:
- https://forum.proxmox.com/forums/proxmox-ve-installation-and-configuration.16/
- https://forum.proxmox.com/forums/announcements.7/
Although this gives a sense of the process, I haven't encountered the specifics.

 

[t.lamprecht]

I can give you a rough general overview, for more specific details, especially about enterprise repo, it would be best to ask in our enterprise support channel.

- do critical security fixes release in all simultaneously?

This depends a lot on the actual fix and the regression impact we predict depending on how big and/or invasive the fix is, but for actual critical issues we target a maximum delay of one day between no-subscription and enterprise. And often a very targeted initial fix with a near-zero regression potential can be done where QA is confident that nothing relevant breaks, then it might be even just a few hours, but that needs the fix to treat a really critical issue with a high confidence level in side effects.
In any case, we release a security advisory only once the fix is rolled out on all repos.

- is the time between releases in test and no-subscription measured in installs or days or weeks or months or bugfixes?

Depends a lot on the changes, most of the time it's between one and a few days at max. Big changes, like a major new QEMU version, it might be a few weeks with the extra announcement thread to bring more attention to the new version. Smaller and/or fixes for annoying things, it might be even just a few hours if we got positive QA and ideally also user feedback.

- how about between no-subscription and enterprise?

For average updates, as in nothing critical, it's normally between a few days and a few weeks to even close to a month, the latter especially for new kernel updates where issues often affect only very specific HW and are not uncovered by just doing the upgrade, but only after actually booting into the kernel.
But again, the actual times are often judged by lots of factors, including but not limited to user feedback, positive or negative, size of changes and so on, and that is basically multiplied with how volatile the repo is advertised, with test being the most volatile and enterprise being the most stable one of the public repos.