Open Stack

TL;DR: +1 for 1-year release, without reducing face-to-face meetings.

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 6:35 PM Matt Riedemann <mriedemos at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Same question as above about just doing CD then.


Why not getting rid of stable branches and releases altogether then?

Honestly, I'm a big fan of CD, but CD and OpenStack is nothing but a wet
dream. That's why I don't think, the 1-year release proposal is about
cutting travel costs. Compared to the costs of the release production
upstream and downstream, travel costs are just a joke. I fully support the
1-year cycle, not because I think it's good to have fewer releases in
general (the opposite is true, I like "release early and often"), but
because I think it's a necessary adaption to reality of OpenStack
development. Release production upstream and downstream creates a _huge_
overhead at the moment, if we like that fact or not, and cutting this
overhead in half is great! In the end the release production is done in
large parts by the same developers that develop upstream as well, and it
would free a lot of resources to do actual upstream development.

Of course, in the perfect world, upstream OpenStack would be a continuous
release-free stream of fresh and bug free software, that people can pull
downstream releases from whenever they like. But that's not the reality, at
least not as long the scope of the product is broader than "Nova on
Devstack". And I honestly don't see a project like OpenStack be "CD'able"
in a foreseeable future. So, to reach CD (which, again, would be awesome)
you have a dependency chain like "better test coverage" -> "shorter
stabilization phase" -> "more frequent releases" -> "CD". So, the time we
reach a stabilization phase of 0 days, that is, no stable branches are
required in general, we reached true CD. But I don't see stabilization
becoming shorter or easier, rather the opposite, because OpenStack becomes
more and more complex and featureful. So, as long as we can't achieve that,
we have to bite the bullet and adapt release cadence to the stabilization
and production efforts, if we like it or not.

BTW. I don't see the 1-year release connected to the frequency of
face-to-face meetings (PTG, Summit, ...), which I think should _not_ be
reduced.


Cheers,

Sven
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