Open Stack

Excerpts from Matthew Treinish's message of 2015-11-09 17:09:54 -0500:
> On Mon, Nov 09, 2015 at 05:41:53PM +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> > 
> > A few cycles ago we set up the Release Cycle Management team which was a
> > bit of a frankenteam of the things I happened to be leading: release
> > management, stable branch maintenance and vulnerability management.
> > While you could argue that there was some overlap between those
> > functions (as in, "all these things need to be released") logic was not
> > the primary reason they were put together.
> > 
> > When the Security Team was created, the VMT was spinned out of the
> > Release Cycle Management team and joined there. Now I think we should
> > spin out stable branch maintenance as well:
> > 
> > * A good chunk of the stable team work used to be stable point release
> > management, but as of stable/liberty this is now done by the release
> > management team and triggered by the project-specific stable maintenance
> > teams, so there is no more overlap in tooling used there
> > 
> > * Following the kilo reform, the stable team is now focused on defining
> > and enforcing a common stable branch policy[1], rather than approving
> > every patch. Being more visible and having more dedicated members can
> > only help in that very specific mission
> > 
> > * The release team is now headed by Doug Hellmann, who is focused on
> > release management and does not have the history I had with stable
> > branch policy. So it might be the right moment to refocus release
> > management solely on release management and get the stable team its own
> > leadership
> > 
> > * Empowering that team to make its own decisions, giving it more
> > visibility and recognition will hopefully lead to more resources being
> > dedicated to it
> > 
> > * If the team expands, it could finally own stable branch health and
> > gate fixing. If that ends up all falling under the same roof, that team
> > could make decisions on support timeframes as well, since it will be the
> > primary resource to make that work
> > 
> > So.. good idea ? bad idea ? What do current stable-maint-core[2] members
> > think of that ? Who thinks they could step up to lead that team ?
> 
> So I don't see the point, do we really think this needs to be a thing? Most of
> the backports and reviews are done by project specific teams. What are you
> actually proposing the team produce? With the point releases going away the only
> actual thing the team is responsible before disappears. Right now most of [1] is
> inactive when it comes to do day to day stable branch activities.

Point releases are not going away, though. We're not synchronizing them,
but we are still going to have stable releases.

> 
> It seems to me with besides a few of us looking at gate issues when we have to
> backport something and find nothing working the only thing [1] does is respond
> to requests to add people to project specific stable core teams. (which is
> something I've argued against in the past) I don't think adding a separate team
> to governance for this really makes sense.
> 
> That being said I can understand your point of view that Doug doesn't want to
> worry about stable, something I can't really blame him for because apparently
> neither do most people (including myself on most days).

I'm unlikely to have time to dive into fixing stable branch issues
myself this cycle, but I still think those branches are valuable
things.  It's not that I don't want to worry about it at all so
much as I want the people who *do* worry about it more than I do
to have more input and flexibility.

Doug

> 
> > [1] http://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html
> > [2] https://review.openstack.org/#/admin/groups/530,members
> > 
> 
> 
> -Matt Treinish