[openstack-dev] [tc] [all] OpenStack moving both too fast and too slow at the same time

Jonathan Proulx jon at csail.mit.edu
Thu May 4 15:18:27 UTC 2017


On Thu, May 04, 2017 at 04:14:07PM +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
:Chris Dent wrote:
:> On Wed, 3 May 2017, Drew Fisher wrote:
:>> "Most large customers move slowly and thus are running older versions,
:>> which are EOL upstream sometimes before they even deploy them."
:> 
:> Can someone with more of the history give more detail on where the
:> expectation arose that upstream ought to be responsible things like
:> long term support? I had always understood that such features were
:> part of the way in which the corporately avaialable products added
:> value?

:In parallel, OpenStack became more stable, so the demand for longer-term
:maintenance is stronger. People still expect "upstream" to provide it,
:not realizing upstream is made of people employed by various
:organizations, and that apparently their interest in funding work in
:that area is pretty dead.

Wearing my Operator hat I don't really care if "LTS" comes from
upstream or downstream.  I think the upstream expectation has
developed becuase there has been some upstream efforts and as far as I
can see no recent downstream efforts in support of stable releases,
though obviously I mostly pay attention to "my" distro so may be
missing things in this space.

Having watched this for some time I agree with everything Thierry has
said.

The increasing demand for "LTS" like releases is definitely a tribute
to the overall maturity of core services.  I used to be desperate for
the next release and back porting patches into custom packages just to
keep things working.

Now if I belived Ubuntu (which my world OpenStack and otherwise
happens to be built on) would provide a direct upgrade path from their
16.04 released OpenStack to what ever lands in their next LTS I'd
probably sit rather happily on that.  Which is a hugely positive shift.

:I agree that our current stable branch model is inappropriate:
:maintaining stable branches for one year only is a bit useless. But I
:only see two outcomes:
:
:1/ The OpenStack community still thinks there is a lot of value in doing
:this work upstream, in which case organizations should invest resources
:in making that happen (starting with giving the Stable branch
:maintenance PTL a job), and then, yes, we should definitely consider
:things like LTS or longer periods of support for stable branches, to
:match the evolving usage of OpenStack.
:
:2/ The OpenStack community thinks this is better handled downstream, and
:we should just get rid of them completely. This is a valid approach, and
:a lot of other open source communities just do that.
:
:The current reality in terms of invested resources points to (2). I
:personally would prefer (1), because that lets us address security
:issues more efficiently and avoids duplicating effort downstream. But
:unfortunately I don't control where development resources are posted.

Yes it seems that way to me as well.

just killing the stable branch model without some plan either
internally or externally to provide a better stability story seems
like it would send the wrong signal.  So I'd much prefer the distro
people to either back option 1) with significant resources so it can
really work or make public commitments to handle option 2) in a
reasonable way.

-Jon



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