OS releases roadmap

Global lifecycle

The OS releases are attached to the following criteria:

• redpesk devel : follows CentOS Stream 10 with binary compatibility
• redpesk LTS: 10 years support with 5 years with functional updates and 5 years with maintenance updates (based on RHEL maintenance schedule)
• One minor release per year planned with intermediary release every 6 months
• Releases naming : redpesk OS versions are named from Brittany Islands names, sorted alphabetically.

  • The first release is Arz   (based on RHEL 8.x)

  • The second release is Batz   (based on RHEL 9.x)

  • The third release is Corn   (based on RHEL 10.x)

  • The fourth release, that will be based on RHEL 11, is unnamed (name to be decided before 2032 - Candidates: open for proposals!)

This is the release planning on the long run:

Zoom on redpesk OS releases and repositories

For each even release of RHEL, a new redpesk OS branch is created (Arz 1.0 for RHEL 8.4, Arz 1.1 for RHEL 8.6, Batz 2.0 for RHEL 9.2, Batz 2.1 for RHEL 9.4, …).

The following diagram explores the branches for redpesk OS Batz 2.x:

There are multiple elements here:

• frozen releases (e.g. 2.0.0, 2.0.1, …)
• “rolling” updates (e.g. 2.0-update, 2.1-update), updated regularly between two releases
• at some point in time, a branch reaches end-of-life: in this case, there’s no more -update repositories.

For a given major release of redpesk OS, the repositories organization reflects the release cycle.

Let’s take a realistic situation in 2023 where:

• Arz 1.0 branch has 3 releases and has reached end-of-life
• Arz 1.1 branch has 2 releases and is still alive (this is the latest branch for Arz, aligned on RHEL 8)
• Batz 2.0 branch has 2 releases and is the first branch for Batz (aligned on RHEL 9)

Then the repositories look like this:

redpesk-lts
├── arz-1.0.0
├── arz-1.0.1
├── arz-1.0.2
├── arz-1.1.0
├── arz-1.1.1
├── arz-1.1-update
├── batz-2.0.0
├── batz-2.0.1
├── batz-2.0-update
├── arz-1.0 -> arz-1.0.2
├── arz-1.1 -> arz-1.1.1
├── arz-1 -> arz-1.1.1
├── arz -> arz-1.1.1
├── batz-2.0 -> batz-2.0.1
├── batz-2 -> batz-2.0.1
└── batz -> batz-2.0.1

Symbolic links allow to choose the stability level required for a given environment (development, integration, production …). For a given release name NAME and version V.M.S (major,minor,subminor):

• NAME-V.M.S points to the specified release (V.M.S): this is guaranteed to never change.
• NAME-V.M points to the latest release in the branch V.M (ex: arz-1.0 -> arz-1.0.2): it changes as soon as a new release is done in the branch V.m.
• NAME-V and NAME point to the latest release of the latest branch (ex: arz-1 -> arz-1.1.1). It changes as soon as a new release is done in the latest branch.
• NAME-V.M-update is the rolling distribution containing updates “on top” of the latest release in a given branch NAME-V.M (ex: arz-1.1-update, batz-2.0-update). It can change at any time. This repository only exists for branches which didn’t reach end-of-life. It can be seen as a preview for the upcoming release in the branch (ex: arz-1.1-update contains updates to be released in arz-1.1.2, which doesn’t exist yet).