Open Stack

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 1:25 AM, Stefano Maffulli <stefano at openstack.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2015-02-28 at 10:25 +0800, Li Ma wrote:
>> Here's a situation that I discovered when I reviewed some patches in
>> the upstream. Currently, for most of the projects, only master branch
>> is well looked after. Even for those stable branches, backport work is
>> not that sufficient.
>
> This message made me scroll the list of people maintaining the stable
> branch: https://review.openstack.org/#/admin/groups/120,members The
> names there seem all to have a lot of other jobs to attend too and I
> suspect they may be overloaded already. So even if it looks like there
> are lots of people capable of approving patches with +2+w votes, there
> may not be enough people doing the heavy lifting to provide patches and
> backports to stable branch.
>
> If stable and backports are a priority, I think it would be good to put
> people to work on those tasks and not expect that someone else will do
> it.

Currently, OpenStack's vision is to create private and public clouds
[1]. When enterprise IT (private clouds) involves, I think stable
release and backports are of higher priority than blueprints. And for
community, LTS policy also needs to be clearer, governed and placed in
the main page.

For this backport issue, IMO, the developer who proposes the patch
should be in charge of backports. However, we are working with the
master branch, maybe someone doesn't realize this patch needs to be
backported to other stable branches or someone doesn't know about how
this patch influences on a given stable release. BTW, there's no
standard and mandatory procedure to check if it is necessary to
backport or not.

I suggest to add a plugin into gerrit review procedure. When someone
would like to provide +w vote, he/she needs to answer one question: is
it necessary to backport? for which stable branch? If some backport
work still needs to be done, the workflow should not be closed (+w)
until the related cherry-pick work is done.

[1] www.openstack.org

- Li Ma (Nick)