Open Stack

Last week at the summit the release team reviewed our notes from
Newton and worked on plans for changes to be implemented during
Ocata.

* Branch automation

  Now that tag management is handled through reviews on openstack/releases,
  we want to add the other major release-related task: branch
  management.  We will start with automating branch creation, and
  then if time permits tackle the workflow for closing a branch
  when it reaches its end-of-life deadline. For more details, see
  the spec: https://review.openstack.org/369643

* Release announcements

  Thierry has already described the plan for making release
  announcements less noisy in another thread to this list in
  http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-November/106579.html

  We are also going to work on automating announcements for release
  candidates for projects using milestones.

* Updating upper-constraints.txt for a release

  When a library is released, the job that adds the tag also submits
  the patch to update upper-constraints.txt to allow the new version
  to be used. This almost always results in the jobs for that u-c
  patch failing, because the package does not actually exist yet.
  We will be moving the constraints update to its own job, which
  will run after the new package is uploaded to PyPI.

* Python 3

  In anticipation of having Python 3 support be a goal for Pike,
  we will start porting our automation scripts to run under Python
  3. This should also improve the reliability of some of the tools
  that work with names and release notes, since those may include
  unicode text.

* Recruiting more reviewers

  With the tagging process fully automated, it is easier for us to
  recruit more reviewers for the release team. We will be working
  with the stable-maint team initially, and then looking for other
  folks interested in being involved in release management.

* New project checklist

  We had a few technical issues with brand new big tent projects
  last cycle because the repositories had not been reconfigured
  after the team was accepted into the big tent. We will be starting
  a checklist of steps project teams need to go through to complete
  their transition into the big tent.

* Improving communication about the schedule

  Given several major holiday periods in the Ocata cycle, it will
  be more important than usual to communicate clearly about release
  freeze periods. We will be adding known freeze periods to the
  schedule page soon.

  We are also working on being able to publish the schedule as an
  ICS file that can be imported into your calendar application of
  choice.

* Decoupling releases from governance tags

  There are a set of tags defined in the governance repository that
  control the behavior for release tools. During Newton we had more
  projects changing their tags than we had previously expected, and
  that resulted in some delays and eventually removing some validation
  logic from the releases repository. During Ocata we will be moving
  the release and type tags out of the governance repository to the
  releases repository. This work won't start right away, because
  we need to assess the impact on other projects like the Foundation's
  project navigator web site.

That covers the major initiatives we have. There are several other
clean-up tasks that may be less visible outside of the team. The full
notes from those sessions are available in the etherpad:
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ocata-relmgt-plan

Doug