Open Stack

Hi all,

In the big tent, project teams are expected to maintain their own
install guides within their projects' source tree. There's a
conversation going on over in the docs list[1] about changing this, but
in the meantime...

Ironic (and presumably other projects) publish versioned documentation,
which includes the install guide. For example, our kilo install guide is
here[2]. However, there's no way to update those, as stable branch
policy[3] only allows for important bug fixes to be backported. For
example, this patch[4] was blocked for this reason (among others).

So, I'd like to propose that in the new world, where projects maintain
their own deployer/operator docs, that we allow documentation backports
(or even changes that are not part of a backport, for changes that only
make sense on the stable branch and not master). They're extremely low
risk, and can be very useful for operators. The alternative is making
sure people are always reading the most up-to-date docs, and in places
that have changed, having "in kilo [...], in liberty [...]", etc, which
is a bit of a maintenance burden.

What do folks think? I'm happy to write up a patch for the project team
guide if there's support for this.

// jim

[1] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-docs/2015-December/008051.html
[2] http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ironic/kilo/deploy/install-guide.html
[3] http://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html
[4] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/219603/