[openstack-dev] [all] Do we need release announcements for all the things?

Clint Byrum clint at fewbar.com
Fri Mar 13 17:22:40 UTC 2015


Excerpts from Doug Hellmann's message of 2015-03-13 08:06:43 -0700:
> 
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2015, at 06:57 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> > Clint Byrum wrote:
> > > I spend a not-insignificant amount of time deciding which threads to
> > > read and which to fully ignore each day, so extra threads mean extra
> > > work, even with a streamlined workflow of single-key-press-per-thread.
> > > 
> > > So I'm wondering what people are getting from these announcements being
> > > on the discussion list. I feel like they'd be better off in a weekly
> > > digest, on a web page somewhere, or perhaps with a tag that could be
> > > filtered out for those that don't benefit from them.
> > 
> > The first value of a release announcement is (obviously) to let people
> > know something was released. There is a bit of a paradox there with some
> > announcements being posted to openstack-announce (in theory low-traffic
> > and high-attention), and some announcements being posted to
> > openstack-dev (high-traffic and medium-attention). Where is the line
> > drawn ?
> > 
> > The second value of a release announcement is the thread it creates in
> > case immediate issues are spotted. I kind of like that some
> > python-*client release announcements are followed-up by a "this broke
> > the world" thread, all in a single convenient package. Delaying
> > announcements defeats that purpose.
> > 
> > We need to adapt our current (restricted) usage of openstack-announce to
> > a big-tent less-hierarchical future anyway: if we continue to split
> > announcements, which projects are deemed "important enough" to be
> > granted openstack-announce access ?
> > 
> > Personally in the future I'm not opposed to allowing any "openstack"
> > project (big-tent definition) to post to openstack-announce (ideally in
> > a standard / autogenerated format) with reply-to set to openstack-dev.
> > We could use a separate list, but then release and OSSA announcements
> > are the only thing we use -announce for currently, so I'm not sure it's
> > worth it.
> > 
> > So I'm +1 on using a specific list (and setting reply-to to -dev), and
> > I'm suggesting openstack-announce should be reused to avoid creating two
> > classes of deliverables (-announce worthy and not).
> 
> We had complaints in the past when we *didn't* send release
> announcements because people were then unaware of why a new release
> might be causing changes in behavior, so we built a bunch of tools to
> make it easy to create uniform and informative release note emails
> containing the level of detail people wanted. So far those are only
> being used by Oslo, but we're moving the scripts to the release-tools
> repo to make them easy for all library maintainers to use.
> 

This is really what I'm asking about. If people were less happy with not
having them, then it makes sense to have them.

> These announcements are primarily for our developer community and the
> folks at the distros who need to know to package the new versions. Are
> we going to start having non-dev folks who subscribe to the announce
> list complain about the release announcements for libraries, then? Are
> enough developers subscribed to the announce list that they will see the
> release messages to meet the original needs we were trying to meet?
> 

I hope I don't come across as complaining. I archive them very rapidly
without ever looking at the content currently. Sometimes they come up in
my searches for topics and then having them in the single timeline is
great, but I have an email reader that supports this without changing
the list behavior. I am more wondering if people who aren't as optimized
as I am have trouble keeping up with them. And having a few less things
to archive manually would certainly be nicer for me, but is a secondary
goal.

I haven't seen very much interest in changing things, mostly people in
support of keeping them as-is. So I suspect people are not annoyed about
this in particular, and we can close the book on this thread.



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