[openstack-dev] [all] [stable] No longer doing stable point releases

Thomas Goirand zigo at debian.org
Tue Jun 9 08:55:55 UTC 2015


On 06/07/2015 06:13 PM, Ian Cordasco wrote:
>>> If you consider *every* commit to be a release, then your life becomes
>>> easier.
>>
>> What does this mean? Am I supposed to upload a patched release to Debian
>> every day? I suppose I didn't understand you correctly here.
> 
> This discussion is about stable branches. Maybe early in a stable branch's
> life there are lots of commits, but as it grows older, the number of
> commits made to a stable branch certainly isn't 1 per day.

If you consider all the projects within the big-tent, that's a lot of
commits still.

>> If we were to do this in downstream distros, we wouldn't have an
>> upstream number matching each commit. This would be a problem because we
>> would loose track of what version we're at between distros.
> 
> It seems from other discussions that there is little coordination between
> distros in the first place, and that is only beginning to improve now, but
> only between close relatives (Ubuntu & Debian, RHEL & CentOS & Fedora,
> etc.). If that's the case, the work to improve coordination, including
> sharing repositories, etc. would seem to alleviate this concern regardless
> of coordinated release tagging.

That's far from being in place. Also, while we are removing point
releases, and support for Icehouse, we still don't have a common private
Gerrit for security, which we've been told about 2 years ago.

Removing collaboration tools before new ones are in place is
definitively not the way to go.

> That said, I know you've said in the past that you do most of your
> packaging in your free-time because it's not part of your job
> responsibilities.

I'm a full time Mirantis employee, and it's my full-time job to do
packaging of OpenStack in Debian (that, plus helping to do MOS).

> I know the same is true for a bunch of OpenStack's
> packagers (including the Gentoo packager).

I believe Gentoo is the only case.

> As someone
> who spends the majority of their free time supporting other software
> beyond OpenStack, I understand how insulting it is to be told you have to
> do more work in the time that you're volunteering.

It being a paid-for job IMO doesn't change the fact we should work
efficiently and the correct way. :)

> I've only been around for a little less than a
> year though, so I have no memory of a backport in one service breaking
> another.

It happened that requirements changed from one version to the next, and
2 projects needed to be updated at once. I don't see this happening
smoothly if we don't have coordinated point releases. And yes, I know,
requirements are *supposed* to be frozen, but between the theory and
what really happens, there's a world...

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)




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