Open Stack

Excerpts from Samuel Cassiba's message of 2017-11-08 08:27:12 -0800:
> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 3:28 PM, Erik McCormick
> <emccormick at cirrusseven.com> wrote:
> > Hello Ops folks,
> >
> > This morning at the Sydney Summit we had a very well attended and very
> > productive session about how to go about keeping a selection of past
> > releases available and maintained for a longer period of time (LTS).
> >
> > There was agreement in the room that this could be accomplished by
> > moving the responsibility for those releases from the Stable Branch
> > team down to those who are already creating and testing patches for
> > old releases: The distros, deployers, and operators.
> >
> > The concept, in general, is to create a new set of cores from these
> > groups, and use 3rd party CI to validate patches. There are lots of
> > details to be worked out yet, but our amazing UC (User Committee) will
> > be begin working out the details.
> >
> > Please take a look at the Etherpad from the session if you'd like to
> > see the details. More importantly, if you would like to contribute to
> > this effort, please add your name to the list starting on line 133.
> >
> > https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/SYD-forum-upstream-lts-releases
> >
> > Thanks to everyone who participated!
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Erik
> >
> > __________________________________________________________________________
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> 
> In advance, pardon the defensive tone. I was not in a position to
> attend, or even be in Sydney. However, as this comes across the ML, I
> can't help but get the impression this effort would be forcing more
> work on already stretched teams, ie. deployment-focused development
> teams already under a crunch as contributor count continues to decline
> in favor of other projects inside and out of OpenStack.
> 

I suspect if LTS's become a normal part of OpenStack, most deployment
projects will decline to support the interim releases. We can infer this
from the way Ubuntu is used. This might actually be a good thing for the
chef OpenStack community. 3 out of 3.5 of you can focus on the LTS bits,
and the 0.5 person can do some best effort to cover the weird corner
case of "previous stable release to master".

The biggest challenge will be ensuring that the skip-level upgrades
work. The current grenade based upgrade jobs are already quite a bear to
keep working IIRC. I've not seen if chef or any of the deployment projects
test upgrades like that.

However, if people can stop caring much about the interim releases and
just keep "previous LTS to master" upgrades working, then that might be
good for casual adoption.

Personally I'd rather we make it easier to run "rolling release"
OpenStack. Maybe we can do that if we stop cutting stable releases every
6 months.