---- On Tue, 06 Jun 2023 12:48:43 -0700 Jeremy Stanley wrote ---
> On 2023-06-06 12:17:23 -0700 (-0700), Ghanshyam Mann wrote:
> [...]
> > This is true but I think this is the point where things are
> > becoming difficult. Even we do not need to but we as community
> > developers keep fixing the EM gate, at least I can tell from my QA
> > experience for this. We should stop at some line but in reality,
> > we end up doing it.
> [...]
>
> Maybe my verbosity made it unclear, so just in case, what I was
> trying to say is that I consider Extended Maintenance to be a failed
> experiment and agree we should be talking about either reverting to
> the prior process from before EM was a thing or finding an
> alternative process that doesn't have so many of the obvious
> shortcomings of EM.
>
> People said if we just stopped EOL'ing branches so soon they would
> show up and help make use of those branches. They didn't, and so the
> expected benefits never materialized.
I agree. If I see the main overhead in EM maintenance is keeping testing green.
it is not easy to keep 11 branches (including Em, supported stable and master)
testing up to date. My point is if we remove all the integration testing (can keep pep8
and unit tests) at the time the branch move to EM will solve the problem that the upstream
community faces to maintain EM branches.
This, IMO, is akin to retiring the branches. How could I, as a developer, patch an older version of a branch against a vulnerability of the style of the recent Cinder one, where the impact is felt cross-project, and you clearly need a working dev environment (such as devstack).
If, as you propose, we stopped doing any integration testing on branches older than 18 months, we would be de-facto retiring the integration testing infrastructure, which shares a huge amount of DNA with our dev tooling infrastructure.
I don't know what the answer is; but this as a middle ground seems like the worst of all worlds: the branches still exist, and we will not have the tools to (manually, not just CI) test meaningful changes on them.
Just a thought!
-
Jay Faulkner
Ironic PTL