Open Stack

Hi all,

I wanted to raise visibility of a problem we're experiencing in TripleO CI,
which I think will potentially affect other projects that consume trunk
builds from the RDO repositories (and potentially other distros too I
guess)

The problem is that we tag our final ocata releases after branching
stable/ocata, but there is then a period prior to cutting pike-1 milestone
releases (or some other intermediate release for projects not following the
milestone model) where trunk package builds n-v-r is older than the stable
branches.

This presents a big problem if you want to test package-derived updates
from stable/$foo to master, as the pacakges don't get updated where the
installed stable one is newer than the one built from master.

I raised this bug initially thinking it was specific to the puppet-*
projects, but it seems from subsequent discussion that it's a broader issue
that may impact many OpenStack projects.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/tripleo/+bug/1669462

I'm not clear on the best path forward at this point, but the simplest one
suggested so far is to simply tag a new pre-milestone/alpha release for all
master branches, which will enable testing upgrades to master.

I know we don't expect to fully support upgrades to pre-milestone releases,
but the requirement here is to simply enable testing them.

A side-benefit of this regular testing e.g via CI is we'll find upgrade issues
much faster than waiting for one or more milestone releases to happen then
doing an upgrade-debug firedrill later in the cycle (which has been bad for
project and deployment teams IMO, so it'd be good to figure out this first
step to enable earlier testing of upgrades to the development release).

Any thoughts on how we can resolve this would be much appreciated, thanks!

Steve