[openstack-dev] [TripleO] Stable branch policy for Mitaka

Steven Hardy shardy at redhat.com
Wed Feb 10 15:57:42 UTC 2016


Hi all,

We discussed this in our meeting[1] this week, and agreed a ML discussion
to gain consensus and give folks visibility of the outcome would be a good
idea.

In summary, we adopted a more permissive "release branch" policy[2] for our
stable/liberty branches, where feature backports would be allowed, provided
they worked with liberty and didn't break backwards compatibility.

The original idea was really to provide a mechanism to "catch up" where
features are added e.g to liberty OpenStack components late in the cycle
and TripleO requires changes to integrate with them.

However, the reality has been that the permissive backport policy has been
somewhat abused (IMHO) with a large number of major features being proposed
for backport, and in a few cases this has broken downstream (RDO) consumers
of TripleO.

Thus, I would propose that from Mitaka, we revise our backport policy to
simply align with the standard stable branch model observed by all
projects[3].

Hopefully this will allow us to retain the benefits of the stable branch
process, but provide better stability for downstream consumers of these
branches, and minimise confusion regarding what is a permissable backport.

If we do this, only backports that can reasonably be considered
"Appropriate fixes"[4] will be valid backports - in the majority of cases
this will mean bugfixes only, and large features where the risk of
regression is significant will not be allowed.

What are peoples thoughts on this?

Thanks,

Steve

[1] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tripleo/2016/tripleo.2016-02-09-14.01.log.html
[2] https://github.com/openstack/tripleo-specs/blob/master/specs/liberty/release-branch.rst
[3] http://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html
[4] http://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html#appropriate-fixes



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