Open Stack

On 2013-04-30 13:12, Sean Dague wrote:
> On 04/30/2013 03:55 PM, Clint Byrum wrote:
> <snip>
>> 
>> I understand that this is a straw-man. I know that other things can
>> happen. But I see a lot of development happen under the stable 
>> release
>> process scenario above. I fail to see where having new code arrive
>> incrementally in small batches and protected by feature flags is 
>> going
>> to make anything worse. Those things, however, should make continuous
>> delivery of OpenStack much smoother.
> 
> Right, it's a straw man, which doesn't help generate any clarity. :)
> 
> I think instead of discussing philosophy here we should talk about
> specifics that happened in the source tree that caused deployers pain,
> and take lessons learned out of them.
> 
> I think the reality is that openstack tree and process is very close
> to what the CD folks want. The only thing that's causing some allergy
> among the core teams is the idea of features coming in in an off
> state, versus coming in default on so they get exercised by our normal
> system.
> 

Thats exactly my point. Large changes are not being exercised by any 
large scale system now while they're baking in a branch, so making them 
enabled by feature flags versus by commit to trunk does not regress 
that, but it does allow deployers to test both code paths and deploy 
both without having to maintain branches of the software.