Open Stack

On Mon, Nov 09, 2015 at 10:54:43PM +0000, Kuvaja, Erno wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 09, 2015 at 05:28:45PM -0500, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> > > Excerpts from Matt Riedemann's message of 2015-11-09 16:05:29 -0600:
> > > >
> > > > On 11/9/2015 10:41 AM, 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
> > > >
> > > > Isn't this kind of already what the stable maint team does? Well,
> > > > that and some QA people like mtreinish and sdague.
> > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > 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 ?
> > > > >
> > > > > [1]
> > > > > http://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html
> > > > > [2] https://review.openstack.org/#/admin/groups/530,members
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > With the decentralizing of the stable branch stuff in Liberty [1] it
> > > > seems like there would be less use for a PTL for stable branch
> > > > maintenance - the cats are now herding themselves, right? Or at
> > > > least that's the plan as far as I understood it. And the existing
> > > > stable branch wizards are more or less around for help and answering
> > questions.
> > >
> > > The same might be said about releasing from master and the release
> > > management team. There's still some benefit to having people dedicated
> > > to making sure projects all agree to sane policies and to keep up with
> > > deliverables that need to be released.
> > 
> > Except the distinction is that relmgt is actually producing something. Relmgt
> > has the releases repo which does centralize library releases, reno to do the
> > release notes, etc. What does the global stable core do? Right now it's there
> > almost entirely to just add people to the project specific stable core teams.
> > 
> > -Matt Treinish
> 
> 
> I'd like to move the discussion from what are the roles of the current stable-maint-core and more towards what the benefits would be having a stable-maint team rather than the -core group alone.
> 
> Personally I think the stable maintenance should be quite a lot more than unblocking gate and approving people allowed to merge to the stable branches.
> 

Sure, but that's not we're talking about here are we? The other tasks, like
backporting changes for example, have been taken on by project teams. Even in
your other email you mentioned that you've been doing backports and other tasks
that you consider stable maint in a glance only context. That's something we
changed in kilo which ttx referenced in [1] to enable that to happen, and it was
the only way to scale things.

The discussion here is about the cross project effort around stable branches,
which by design is a more limited scope now. Right now the cross project effort
around stable branch policy is really 2 things (both of which ttx already
mentioned):

1. Keeping the gates working on the stable branches
2. Defining and enforcing stable branch policy.

The only lever on #2 is that the global stable-maint-core is the only group
which has add permissions to the per project stable core groups. (also the
stable branch policy wiki, but that rarely changes) We specifically shrunk it to
these 2 things in. [1] Well, really 3 things there, but since we're not doing
integrated stable point releases in the future its now only 2.

This is my whole argument that creating a new team doesn't do anything. Living
under rel-mgt, some other project, or creating a new one isn't going to change
the fact that cross-project stable maint is the same 2 tasks which basically
nobody cares about, which TBH your email is just an indication of. Even if we
wanted to grow to something beyond these 2 tasks they would still be the core of
whatever it becomes and a lack of people caring about them will just block any
potential scope growth.

Frankly, this is the problem with any ML or open discussion about stable branch
maint. Everyone has an opinion about everything but lacks actual context or
never steps up to work on the cross-project side of this. I don't think creating
a new team that has no repos or other artifacts and therefore no stackalytics
credit (and by extension corporate chest thumping) is magically going to create
people actually working on this.

The logical follow on idea to the above is to create a stable branch policy doc
repo and a project team to own that. But, I still don't think that solves the
problem, especially since the real priority issue in this space is #1 which
at most is a handful of us bothering to look at that, (well that and the stable
policy barely ever changes) which honestly really isn't the majority of the
stable-maint-core group.  We also have a similar problem with gate issues on
master and it's mostly the same people looking at these things there too.

IMHO the only way for creating a separate project team to be useful is to
re-centralize more responsibilities of stable maint, which is something I don't
think we should do because we'll just hit the same scaling issues we had before
kilo which prompted that change in the first place. It's the same problem every
horizontal, cross project, or whatever you want to call it effort has with
OpenStack's growth and why most have moved to the distributed self service
models.

But, if the goal is just to not make Doug responsible for #2, which is something
ttx was primarily doing before, then I guess it's fine but we should be honest
about it and just make ttx the new team leader. :) I honestly don't think
anything else discussed will change by explicitly making it a separate team.

-Matt Treinish

> > 
> > > >
> > > > [1]
> > > > http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-November/078
> > > > 281.html
> > > >
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