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Hey all,

It's come to my attention that a number of folks are not happy that
Nova's trunk branch (lp:nova) is, shall we say, "less than stable". :)

First, before going into some suggestions on keeping trunk more
stable, I'd like to point out that trunk is, by nature, an actively
developed source tree. Nobody should have an expectation that they can
simply bzr branch lp:nova and everything will magically work with a)
their existing installations of software packages, b) whatever code
commits they have made locally, or c) whatever specific
hypervisor/volume/network environment that they test their local code
with. The trunk branch is, after all, in active development.

That said, there's *no* reason we can't *improve* the relative
stability of the trunk branch to make life less stressful for
contributors.  Here are a few suggestions on how to keep trunk a bit
more stable for those developers who actively develop from trunk.

1) Participate fully in code reviews. If you suspect a proposed branch
merge will "mess everything up for you", then you should notify
reviewers and developers about your concerns. Be proactive.

2) If you pull trunk and something breaks, don't just complain about
it. Log a bug immediately and talk to the reviewers/approvers of the
patch that broke your environment. Be constructive in your criticism,
and be clear about why the patch should have been more thoroughly or
carefully reviewed. If you don't, we're bound to repeat mistakes.

3) Help us to write functional and integration tests. It's become
increasingly clear from the frequency of breakages in trunk (and other
branches) that our unit tests are nowhere near sufficient to catch a
large portion of bugs. This is to be expected. Our unit tests use
mocks and stubs for virtually everything, and they only really test
code interfaces, and they don't even test that very well. We're
working on adding functional tests to Hudson that will run, as the
unit test do, before any merge into trunk, with any failure resulting
in a failed merge. However, we need your help to create functional
tests and integration tests (tests that various *real* components work
together properly).  We also need help writing test cases that ensure
software library dependencies and other packaging issues are handled
properly and don't break with minor patches.

4) If you have a specific environment/setup that you use (Rackers and
Anso guys, here...), then we need your assistance to set up test
clusters that will pull trunk into a wiped test environment and ensure
that a series of realistic calls to the Nova API are properly handled.
I know some of you are working on getting hardware ready. We need help
from the software teams to ensure that these environments are
initialized with the exact setups you use.

The more testing we fire off against each potential merge into trunk,
and the more those tests are hitting real-life deployment
environments, the more stable trunk will become and the easier your
life as a contributor will be.

Thanks in advance for your assistance, and please don't hesitate to
expand on any more suggestions you might have to stabilize trunk.

-jay