Open Stack

On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 01:39:55AM +0000, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> On 2016-08-09 15:56:57 -0700 (-0700), Mike Perez wrote:
> > As others have said and as being a Cinder stable core myself, the status-quo
> > and this proposal itself are terrible practices because there is no testing
> > behind it, thereby it not being up to the community QA standards set.
> [...]
> 
> In fairness to Sean, this thread stared because he was asking in
> #openstack-infra for help creating some long-lived driver fix
> branches because he felt it was against stable branch policy to
> backport bugfixes for drivers. Since this was an unprecedented
> request, I recommended he first raise the topic on this list to find
> out if this is a common problem across other projects and whether
> stable branch policy should be revised to permit driver fixes.
> 
> There was a brief discussion of what to do if the Cinder team wanted
> driver fixes to EOL stable series, and I still firmly believe effort
> there is better expended attempting to help extend stable branch
> support since "convenience to package maintainers" (what he said
> this plan was trying to solve) is the primary reason we provide
> those branches to begin with.
> 
> So I guess what I'm asking: If stable branches exist as a place for
> package maintainers to collaborate on a common set of backported
> fixes, and are not actually usable to that end, why do we continue
> to provide them? Should we just stop testing stable branches
> altogether since their primary value would (as is suggested) be
> served even without our testing efforts? Ceasing any attempts to
> test backports post-release would certainly free up a lot of our
> current upstream effort and resources we could redirect into other
> priorities. Or is it just stable branch changes for drivers we
> shouldn't bother testing?

Well, at a bare minimum we need the previous release around to test upgrades
which is very important. But, this exact argument has come up in the past when
we've had this exact discussion before. (it's been at least once a cycle for as
long as I can remember) I might have actually proposed having only one stable
branch at a time during one of the past summits. But, every time it's been
proposed in the past people come out of the woodwork and say there is value in
continuing them, so we've continued maintaining them. I do agree though, that it
does feel like there is a disconnect between downstream consumers and upstream
when we get proposals like this while at the same time we have had recent quite
lengthy discussions where we decided not to extend our support windows because
it's not feasible given the level of activity.

As for not testing stable changes for drivers I fundamentally disagree with any
approach that puts us in a situation where we are landing patches in an
OpenStack project that does not have any testing. This is a core part of doing
development "the OpenStack way", (to quote the governance repo) if the driver
code is part of the project then we need to be testing it.

-Matt Treinish
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