[ofiwg] libfabric releases, stable branches, and DL providers

[Hefty, Sean]

I'm looking for input on improving stable release support.

Specifically, libfabric supports external providers, which allow updating providers separately from libfabric.  This does not appear to be broadly used, and my guess is that may largely be due to the difficulty in creating a provider release.

We can build DL providers today.  But how do we expand this to create source packages?

As an example, I would like to generate a source package for a provider, say tcp, from the latest release.  Ideally, that source package would work with all previous libfabric versions.

If a single source package isn't feasible, an alternative would be to generate packages for each libfabric version.

I'd like to start with setting up the build system to handle this, then work through the code compatibility issues that might arise out of this.

- Sean