Open Stack

Jean-Philippe Evrard wrote:
> [...]
> Here is what I read:
> 1) Many want more releases, not less. I haven't seen a complaint about tagging more releases.
> 2) More than one person is proposing to abandon the integrated release, and nobody has complained about it.

Here are a few drawbacks of abandoning the integrated release (which is 
really a "synchronized release"):

- You would no longer have a baseline of components that are heavily 
tested together which we do community QA on and (collectively) clearly 
sign off on, so downstream integrators are on their own and have much 
more work to do

- You would no longer have clearly-comparable points between 
distributions. Everyone knows what "running Ussuri" means, which 
facilitates communication and bug report handling in the community.

- You would no longer have clear community support commitments. We 
currently maintain and fix bug reports from people running vanilla 
"Ussuri"... but do we want to care about every combination of components 
under the sun? (maybe we do already)

- You would no longer have "OpenStack" released, so you miss the regular 
marketing opportunity to remind the rest of the world that it still 
exists. The OpenStack brand fades, and it gets more complicated to get 
development resources to work on it.

Without the synchronized release, OpenStack essentially becomes a 
rolling distribution of cloud components on which we make very limited 
guarantees. I guess it is suitable to build maintained distributions on, 
but it really is no longer directly usable beyond development. Is that 
what we want?

> 3) Many people seem eager to carry "stable branches" for "critical patches", but no new definition of such criticality was done.

Note that a common stable branch cut is *exactly* the same thing as a 
synchronized release... So I see 2 and 3 as being opposed views.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)