Open Stack

On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Steve Gordon <sgordon at redhat.com> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Li Ma" <skywalker.nick at gmail.com>
>> Cc: enterprise-wg at lists.openstack.org
>>
>
> Who defines what is "necessary" to backport and how many releases back? If you ask different people or organizations these questions you will likely get very different answers. You are correct in that there is no standard and mandatory procedure to check if it is necessary to backport, in fact the current guidelines work in the opposite direction. Anyone can propose a backport as long as the change meets the criteria set out in https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/StableBranch#Stable_branch_policy.
>
> This is not, I believe, by accident but rather a result of the fact that there is little appetite in the development community for maintaining the stable branches outside of a couple of people representing the distributions. As there are very few people actively reviewing stable branch submissions there is often a delay before they are approved (this was one of the complaints in the kilo edition of this saga: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/kilo-relmgt-stable-branches).

That makes sense. Thanks for explaining it. Maybe LTS is too much for
development community.

> Somewhat related to the above, while this is simple on paper for it to have any chance of success it requires buy in from the developer community both to convince a critical mass to support implementing such a rule and to build the stable branch review teams to cope with the increased submissions (otherwise the problem just moved down the chain because instead of not being proposed to stable the changes will be proposed to stable and languish in the review queue). How do you propose incentivising the adding of this rule, answering of the question honestly (as above for many the answer to the question is going to always be no, because for them a backport is not necessary as they don't use stable branches), and reviewing of stable branch changes.
>
> The alternative as Steffano suggests is for organizations interested in this to assign resources to (a) monitoring patch submissions for potential backports to propose (b) reviewing such proposals with a view to ultimately expanding the membership of stable-maint-core. As I noted above, for your proposal to be successful the second part of this pertaining to more stable branch reviewers is required regardless.

I cannot agree with you more. Actually stable branch maintenance is
also the value-added part for those distributions. However, as
OpenStack and its huge community attracts much attention from
enterprise IT and it also does maintain one or more stable releases, I
think stable-release should be as stable as possible, not
nearly-stable-release nor bug-exposed-but-never-fixed-release. This
vague policy may affect the confidence for those traditional IT to try
to adopt OpenStack.

Besides the reviewer team, I think backport submitters are also important.

--
Li Ma (Nick)
Email: skywalker.nick at gmail.com