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

Doug Hellmann doug at doughellmann.com
Sat May 6 21:06:19 UTC 2017


Excerpts from Thierry Carrez's message of 2017-05-04 16:14:07 +0200:
> 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?
> 
> We started with no stable branches, we were just producing releases and
> ensuring that updates vaguely worked from N-1 to N. There were a lot of
> distributions, and they all maintained their own stable branches,
> handling backport of critical fixes. That is a pretty classic upstream /
> downstream model.
> 
> Some of us (including me) spotted the obvious duplication of effort
> there, and encouraged distributions to share that stable branch
> maintenance work rather than duplicate it. Here the stable branches were
> born, mostly through a collaboration between Red Hat developers and
> Canonical developers. All was well. Nobody was saying LTS back then
> because OpenStack was barely usable so nobody wanted to stay on any
> given version for too long.
> 
> Maintaining stable branches has a cost. Keeping the infrastructure that
> ensures that stable branches are actually working is a complex endeavor
> that requires people to constantly pay attention. As time passed, we saw
> the involvement of distro packagers become more limited. We therefore
> limited the number of stable branches (and the length of time we
> maintained them) to match the staffing of that team. Fast-forward to
> today: the stable team is mostly one person, who is now out of his job
> and seeking employment.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.

Dropping stable branches completely would mean no upstream bugfix
or security releases at all. I don't think we want that.

Doug

> 
> 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.
> 



More information about the OpenStack-dev mailing list