Open Stack

Excerpts from Sam Betts (sambetts)'s message of 2017-08-21 10:01:35 +0000:
> Quick reply with my thoughts in-line.
> 
> Sam
> 
> On 21/08/2017, 10:13, "Dmitry Tantsur" <dtantsur at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>     (adding the release and stable team just for their information)
>     
>     Thanks Julia and everyone for handling this situation while I was out. More 
>     comments inline.
>     
>     On 08/17/2017 07:13 PM, Julia Kreger wrote:
>     > Greetings everyone!
>     > 
>     > As some of you may have noticed, we released ironic 9.0.0 today. But
>     > wait! There is more!
>     > 
>     > We triggered this release due to a number of issues, one of which was
>     > that we learned that we needed the stable/pike branch for our grenade
>     > jobs to execute properly. This was not done previously because
>     > Ironic’s release model is incompatible with making release candidate
>     > releases.
>     
>     Yep :( So, I think the lesson to learn is to create our stable/XXX branch at the 
>     same time as the other projects. We kind of knew that already, but did not 
>     anticipate such a huge breakage so quickly. I suggest we don't try it in Queens :)

Yes, we do try to encourage teams to branch around that RC1 period when
the milestone-based projects branch to avoid these sorts of issues.

>     
>     Now, with that in place we still have two options:
>     1. A conservative one - make the branching the hard feature freeze, similar to 
>     other projects. We may start with a soft freeze at around M3, and just move into 
>     Queens when stable/queens is created. As that point, what is out - is out.
>     2. Alternative - continue making selected feature backports until the final 
>     freeze roughly one week before the final release. This kind of contradicts 
>     calling a branch "stable" though.

I see that Ironic didn't really take advantage of the
cycle-with-intermediary model by preparing any intermediary releases
during pike, so perhaps it would be simplest to change the release
model to cycle-with-milestones and align with the other projects
that way?

>     
>     I don't have a strong opinion, but I'm slightly more in favor of the 
>     conservation option #1 to avoid confusing people and complicating the process.
>     
>     Thoughts?
> 
> Personally, I think option 2 still makes sense, and it aligns us closely with the process in the other projects, the difference between us and them is that their branch is cut using a release candidate instead of a real release. The act of backporting things into the stable branch and then re-releasing is the same though.
> 
> Another alternative I wonder if we should consider is cutting our branch earlier in the cycle, when we make our first intermediary release, and then finding out if we can sync the branches at each release time instead of backporting everything. E.g. git checkout stable/X, git reset –hard origin/master or git rebase master, git push. Doing this will allow us to retain the git history and same commit ids from master to stable/X until master stops developing stable/X and moves on to stable/X+1. I think another advantage of this is it also allows people to find and use our latest intermediary releases easier. But I don’t know how nicely this would work with all the tooling etc the release team has in place.

I don't think that is something the release team would be prepared
to support. We're trying to avoid having every project handling
releases and branches in their own way, because it makes tooling
that much harder to deal with.

>     
>     > 
>     > Once we’ve confirmed that our grenade testing is passing, we will back
>     > port patches we had previously approved, but that had not landed, from
>     > master to stable/pike.
>     
>     ++ I've approved a few patches already, and will continue approving them today.
>     
>     > 
>     > As a result, please anticipate Ironic’s official Pike release for this
>     > cycle to be 9.1.0, if the stars, gates, and job timeouts align with
>     > us.
>     
>     Right, I think we will request it on Wednesday, to allow a bit more time to test 
>     our newly populated not-so-stable stable/pike :)
>     
>     > 
>     > If there are any questions, please feel free to stop by
>     > #openstack-ironic. We have also been keeping our general purpose
>     > whiteboard[1] up to date, you can see our notes regarding our current
>     > plan starting at line 120, and notes regarding gate failures and
>     > issues starting at line 37.
>     > Thanks!
>     > 
>     > -Julia
>     > 
>     > [1]: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/IronicWhiteBoard
>     > 
>     > __________________________________________________________________________
>     > OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
>     > Unsubscribe: OpenStack-dev-request at lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe
>     > http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
>     > 
>