Discussion related to public releases of the CCPP

[grantfirl]

• Is it valuable to have public releases?
• Is the content of releases adequate?
• Is the current frequency of releases effective for the users?

[mkavulich]

Notes from CCPP visioning workshop:

What works: Public releases are valuable to the community for many reasons. While some developers working constantly with the latest/greatest code may not make use of them, having regular benchmarks of tested, vetted code is important, especially code in suites that others have settled on/are using so experiments can be compared and schemes are known to work well together. Releases also allow for a “rallying point” to make sure documentation, tutorials, videos, and other training materials are up-to-date. The current cadence of releases is good: more frequently would have limited benefits because people doing experiments/studies over the course of a year or more won’t update during that time anyway.
Things that could be improved: We need a better plan so previous releases will actually be guaranteed to work, as replication and comparison is the whole point of maintaining older versions. Is the answer containers, or is versioning tied with spack-stack libraries sufficient? There is also a desire for more documentation/context on why things are changed.