Re: Advisory dates

[Kurt Seifried <kseifried () redhat com>]

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On 04/24/2013 09:00 AM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> I'm curious as to what kind of policies various distros have in
> place wrt release dates for advisories.  We (FreeBSD) have a list
> of dates to avoid, which include major religious holidays, New
> Year's Day etc., and try to avoid releasing advisories on or
> immediately before these dates. But May is often problematic, with
> May Day (May 1st) and Liberation Day (May 8th in Western Europe,
> May 9th in Eastern Europe) clustered together.  An early Easter
> adds Ascension to the mix (May 17th last year, May 9th this year).
> A late Easter is even worse: the Holy Week in late April, followed
> by a four-day week, with the next week cut short by May 1st and the
> one after that amputated by May 8th / 9th.
>
> Not to mention national or regional holidays such as Cinco de Mayo
> (May 5th, obviously) or Norway's Constitution Day (May 17th)...
>
> How do you deal with situations like this?  And do you have
> documented policies or guidelines?

Ultimately if we start scoring off major holidays we've have no
release dates left ;)

In general Red Hat goes by major North American statutory holidays
(many of which tend to be global, e.g. Christmas). We also do our best
to avoid North American Friday (which is Saturday in Europe/Asia) and
North American Saturday/Sunday as well. Other than that we tend to
release as needed:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhsa-announce/2013-April/date.html

and so on. Also some historical data on which weekdays/times are the
busiest:

http://www.awe.com/mark/blog/20111111.html

> DES


- -- 
Kurt Seifried Red Hat Security Response Team (SRT)
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