Open Stack

As we discussed at the summit, we are going to be changing the way we
handle releases from stable branches, starting with stable/liberty this
cycle.

In the past the release team and stable maintenance team have
coordinated stable releases of all projects at specific times during the
life cycle of each stable branch. With the liberty release we
re-versioned most projects so they are no longer using the same release
numbers, so synchronizing their stable releases makes less sense. We
originally wanted to either stop releasing from stable branches at all,
or to treat every stable commit as a release. However, it doesn’t always
make sense to tag every commit to a stable branch so we compromised on
having projects release from stable branches frequently and when they
need to do so.

Starting immediately, projects maintaining stable/liberty branches will
need to manage their stable branch releases by proposing tags to the
openstack/releases repository when the maintenance team feels it is
appropriate.

Our recommendation is to release relatively often, to avoid having
fixes land without being pushed out to users. Security fixes should
probably be released immediately, and the urgency of releases for
other fixes should be based on the nature of the change. For example,
if there are several stable fixes queued up to be merged in a short
period of time, it would make sense to wait to release all of them
instead of releasing each separately.  This is going to involve
applying judgment, and we’ll need to collaborate to decide what
heuristics to use.

Doug