Open Stack

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018, at 8:00 AM, Sean McGinnis wrote:
> Hello Cinder and Infra teams. Cinder needs some help from infra or some
> pointers on how to proceed.
> 
> tl;dr - The openstack/cinder repo had a driverfixes/ocata branch created for
> fixes that no longer met the more restrictive phase II stable policy criteria.
> Extended maintenance has changed that and we want to delete driverfixes/ocata
> to make sure patches are going to the right place.
> 
> Background
> ----------
> Before the extended maintenance changes, the Cinder team found a lot of vendors
> were maintaining their own forks to keep backported driver fixes that we were
> not allowing upstream due to the stable policy being more restrictive for older
> (or deleted) branches. We created the driverfixes/* branches as a central place
> for these to go so distros would have one place to grab these fixes, if they
> chose to do so.
> 
> This has worked great IMO, and we do occasionally still have things that need
> to go to driverfixes/mitaka and driverfixes/newton. We had also pushed a lot of
> fixes to driverfixes/ocata, but with the changes to stable policy with extended
> maintenance, that is no longer needed.
> 
> Extended Maintenance Changes
> ----------------------------
> With things being somewhat relaxed with the extended maintenance changes, we
> are now able to backport bug fixes to stable/ocata that we couldn't before and
> we don't have to worry as much about that branch being deleted.
> 
> I had gone through and identified all patches backported to driverfixes/ocata
> but not stable/ocata and cherry-picked them over to get the two branches in
> sync. The stable/ocata should now be identical or ahead of driverfixes/ocata
> and we want to make sure nothing more gets accidentally merged to
> driverfixes/ocata instead of the official stable branch.
> 
> Plan
> ----
> We would now like to have the driverfixes/ocata branch deleted so there is no
> confusion about where backports should go and we don't accidentally get these
> out of sync again.
> 
> Infra team, please delete this branch or let me know if there is a process
> somewhere I should follow to have this removed.

The first step is to make sure that all changes on the branch are in a non open state (merged or abandoned). https://review.openstack.org/#/q/project:openstack/cinder+branch:driverfixes/ocata+status:open shows that there are no open changes.

Next you will want to make sure that the commits on this branch are preserved somehow. Git garbage collection will delete and cleanup commits if they are not discoverable when working backward from some ref. This is why our old stable branch deletion process required we tag the stable branch as $release-eol first. Looking at `git log origin/driverfixes/ocata ^origin/stable/ocata --no-merges --oneline` there are quite a few commits on the driverfixes branch that are not on the stable branch, but that appears to be due to cherry pick writing new commits. You have indicated above that you believe the two branches are in sync at this point. A quick sampling of commits seems to confirm this as well.

If you can go ahead and confirm that you are ready to delete the driverfixes/ocata branch I will go ahead and remove it.

Clark