Open Stack

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 01:06:14AM +0100, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> On 02/24/2015 12:27 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > I'm actually trying to judge it from the POV of users, not just
> > developers. I find it pretty untenable that in the fast moving
> > world of cloud, users have to wait as long as 6 months for a
> > feature to get into a openstack release, often much longer.
> 
> If you were trying to judge from the POV of users, then you would
> consider that basically, they don't really care the brand new shiny
> feature which just appear. They care having a long time support for
> whatever version of OpenStack they have installed, without having the
> head-aches of upgrading which is famously painful with OpenStack. This
> shows clearly on our user surveys which are presented on every summit:
> users are lagging behind, with a majority still running with OpenStack
> releases which are already EOL.
> 
> In fact, if you want to judge from the POV of our users, we should *SLOW
> DOWN* our release cycles, and probably move to something like one
> release every year or 2. We should also try to have longer periods of
> support for our stable releases, which would (with my Debian package
> maintainer hat on!) help distributions to do such security support.

It is not actually that simple IME. As I describe elsewhere in this
thread, users basically want no new features at all ever, except for
the new features that are specifically relevant to what they want,
and of course every users desired feature is different. It is essentially
impossible to satisfy the requests in this way because they are inherantly
contradictory & conflicting. In reality what they asking is not that we
reduce the number of releases or frequency of releases, but rather that
they be able to stay running on a chosen release for longer.

IOW The frequency of releases doesn't matter as long as they are not being
forced to upgrade to the newer releases unreasonably quickly. From that
POV I can certainly see how OpenStack is not satisfying them well,
because if they do choose to skip 2-3 releases, they'll find themselves
EOLd and also they'll be forced to deploy each intermediate release in
order to apply upgrades, before finally getting to their target release.

Regards,
Daniel
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