Open Stack

Hey Elod and Vlad (and the ML, cc'ed)

This is continuing the conversation Elod and I had on IRC. The
immediate context is [1], which is a test refactor backport that in
turn enables conflict-free backporting of at least two fixes.

>From Red Hat's point of view, we will have to care about stable/train
for *very* long time, so we'd like to do everything we can to make our
lives easier, including backportings things are aren't strictly
necessary (like test refactors) in order to greatly facilitate future
backports, which tend to be of the "func reproducer test + actual fix"
variety.

Elod made the excellent point that while this approach does make
backports to train much easier to both write and review, it also
"postpones" all of the manual conflict resolution work onto anyone
doing stable/stein backports.

I went and gathered data. I looked at the last 6 months of backports
in Gerrit. At the time of this writing, stable/train 72 [2] had and
stable/stein had 24 [3]. Out of the latter, Vlad Gusev was the main
non-Red Hat contributor.

So my proposal is simple: I'm willing to help resolve conflicts in
stable/stein backport for folks like Vlad, if it means making
backports to stable/train easier. I'm confident that it would still
mean an overall reduction in man-hours for backports, even if I become
personally on the hook to deal with the fallout of backporting test
refactors to stable/train.

Cheers!

[1] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/791481
[2] https://review.opendev.org/q/project:openstack/nova+branch:stable/train+-age:6month
[3] https://review.opendev.org/q/project:openstack/nova+branch:stable/stein+-age:6month