Open Stack

Joe, Matt & Matthew:

I hear your frustration with broken stable branches. With my
vulnerability management team member hat, responsible for landing
patches there with a strict deadline, I can certainly relate with the
frustration of having to dive in to unbork the branch in the first
place, rather than concentrate on the work you initially planned on doing.

That said, wearing my stable team member hat, I think it's a bit unfair
to say that things are worse than they were and call for dramatic
action. The stable branch team put a structure in place to try to
continuously fix the stable branches rather than reactively fix it when
we need it to work. Those champions have been quite active[1] unbreaking
it in the past months. I'd argue that the branch is broken much less
often than it used to. That doesn't mean it's never broken, though, or
that those people are magicians.

One issue in the current situation is that the two groups (you and the
stable maintainers) seem to work in parallel rather than collaborate.
It's quite telling that the two groups maintained separate etherpads to
keep track of the fixes that needed landing.

[1] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/stable-tracker

Matthew Treinish wrote:
> So I think it's time we called the icehouse branch and marked it EOL. We
> originally conditioned the longer support window on extra people stepping
> forward to keep things working. I believe this latest issue is just the latest
> indication that this hasn't happened. Issue 1 listed above is being caused by
> the icehouse branch during upgrades. The fact that a stable release was pushed
> at the same time things were wedged on the juno branch is just the latest
> evidence to me that things aren't being maintained as they should be. Looking at
> the #openstack-qa irc log from today or the etherpad about trying to sort this
> issue should be an indication that no one has stepped up to help with the
> maintenance and it shows given the poor state of the branch.

I disagree with the assessment. People have stepped up. I think the
stable branches are less often broken than they were, and stable branch
champions (as their tracking etherpad shows) have made a difference.
There just has been more issues as usual recently and they probably
couldn't keep track. It's not a fun job to babysit stable branches,
belittling the stable branch champions results is not the best way to
encourage them to continue in this position. I agree that they could
work more with the QA team when they get overwhelmed, and raise more red
flags when they just can't keep up.

I also disagree with the proposed solution. We announced a support
timeframe for Icehouse, our downstream users made plans around it, so we
should stick to it as much as we can. If we dropped stable branch
support every time a patch can't be landed there, there would just not
be any stable branch.

Joe Gordon wrote:
> Where is it documented that Adam is the Juno branch champion and Ihar is
> Icehouse's? I didn't see it anywhere in the wiki.

It was announced here:
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-November/050390.html

I agree it should be documented on the wiki.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)