[openstack-dev] [TripleO] Backwards compatibility policy for our projects

Tomas Sedovic tsedovic at redhat.com
Mon Jun 16 16:19:40 UTC 2014


All,

After having proposed some changes[1][2] to tripleo-heat-templates[3],
reviewers suggested adding a deprecation period for the merge.py script.

While TripleO is an official OpenStack program, none of the projects
under its umbrella (including tripleo-heat-templates) have gone through
incubation and integration nor have they been shipped with Icehouse.

So there is no implicit compatibility guarantee and I have not found
anything about maintaining backwards compatibility neither on the
TripleO wiki page[4], tripleo-heat-template's readme[5] or
tripleo-incubator's readme[6].

The Release Management wiki page[7] suggests that we follow Semantic
Versioning[8], under which prior to 1.0.0 (t-h-t is ) anything goes.
According to that wiki, we are using a stronger guarantee where we do
promise to bump the minor version on incompatible changes -- but this
again suggests that we do not promise to maintain backwards
compatibility -- just that we document whenever we break it.

According to Robert, there are now downstreams that have shipped things
(with the implication that they don't expect things to change without a
deprecation period) so there's clearly a disconnect here.

If we do promise backwards compatibility, we should document it
somewhere and if we don't we should probably make that more visible,
too, so people know what to expect.

I prefer the latter, because it will make the merge.py cleanup easier
and every published bit of information I could find suggests that's our
current stance anyway.

Tomas

[1]: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/99384/
[2]: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/97939/
[3]: https://github.com/openstack/tripleo-heat-templates
[4]: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO
[5]:
https://github.com/openstack/tripleo-heat-templates/blob/master/README.md
[6]: https://github.com/openstack/tripleo-incubator/blob/master/README.rst
[7]: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO/ReleaseManagement
[8]: http://semver.org/



More information about the OpenStack-dev mailing list