[openstack-dev] [all] [stable] No longer doing stable point releases

Clint Byrum clint at fewbar.com
Fri Jun 5 17:25:13 UTC 2015


Excerpts from Thierry Carrez's message of 2015-06-05 05:46:07 -0700:
> So.. summarizing the various options again:
> 

Thanks for the excellent summary Thierry
> Plan C
> Let projects randomly tag point releases whenever
> (-) Still a bit costly in terms of herding cats
> 

I feel like plan C is the smallest change one can make while still moving
toward lowering the project-wide maintenance costs of stable branches.

I don't know if I saw this highlighted enough during the discussion phase,
but the reason this might be a good idea is that stable releases, unlike
"trunk", have a very different purpose and mode.

Unlike with the coordinated release of many projects all at once, we
are not trying to make sure the pieces still fit together. We've been
careful, in stable release policy, to be sure that we are minimizing
changes, so I think coordinating them is unnecessary overhead.

However, releasing all the commits every time does also mean that there's
no signal to downstream that now is a good time to pull this stable
branch and incorporate it into your systems. Even if each project ends up
releasing weekly right after their meeting in a semi-automatic fashion,
this means that users and packagers can attend the meeting, read the
minutes, and have a passive communication stream that doesn't require
them to read and grok every single commit whenever it might be approved.

Finally, I don't think this is still costly in terms of herding cats,
because we have very few cats actually grazing in the stable branch
pastures. I suggest that stable branch maintainers simply get used to
releasing on a weekly basis if there are new commits, and use that as
an opportunity to highlight the excellent work their community has done.
If they can't do that now, lets empower them to tag and release and send
release announcements.



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