SBN

New Suricata release model

suri-400x400As the team is back from a very successful week in Barcelona, I’d like to take a moment on what we discussed and decided on with regards to development.

One thing no one was happy with is how the release schedules are working. Releases were meant to reasonably frequent, but the time between major releases was growing longer and longer. The 2.0 branch for example, is closing in on 2 years as the stable branch. The result is that many people are missing out on many of the improvements we’ve been doing. Currently many people using Suricata actually use a beta version, of even our git master, in production!

What we’re going to try is time based releases. Pretty much releases will be more like snapshots of the development branch. We think this can work as our dev branch is more and more stable due to our extensive QA setup.

Of course, we’ll have to make sure we’re not going to merge super intrusive changes just before a release. We’ll likely get into some pattern of merge windows and (feature) freezes, but how this will exactly play out is something we’ll figure out as we go.

We’re going to try to shoot for 3 of such releases per year.

In our redmine ticket tracker, I’ve also created a new pseudo-version ‘Soon’. Things we think should be addressed for the next release, will be added there. But we’ll retarget the tickets when they are actually implemented.

Since it’s already almost 2 years since we’ve done 2.0, we think the next release warrants a larger jump in the versioning. So we’re going to call it 3.0. The first release candidate will likely be released this week hopefully followed by a stable in December.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Inliniac authored by inliniac. Read the original post at: https://blog.inliniac.net/2015/11/24/new-suricata-release-model/