launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[William Grant <me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2010-09-28 at 14:07 +1300, Robert Collins wrote:
> Hi, we have currently a production-stable branch which is private; it
> is maintained with CP's and merges during a cycle and discarded every
> time we bring db-stable into play.

Private branches make me sad. I will be glad to see them disappear.

> We deploy stable rather than production-stable to servers. This would
> mean no more CP's - only cowboys and deploys.
> We shouldn't need CP's because we have the QA process Maris mailed out
> for moving things on stable into production.
> 
> And at that point, if we have a security issue we have to deploy asap;
> we'd do the following:
>  - cowboy it out there [and keep it as a cowboy on future deploys]
>  - land a regular branch fixing it for good
>  - remove the cowboy when the regular branch has been incorporated
> into the main deployed codebase.
> 
> This would chop 4 hours off the time that things take to deploy,
> remove one buildbot queue and generally make the whole code->live
> story a bit simpler, at the cost of making the security-fix story more
> complex. Personally, I think that that is a net win.

It's not just security fixes that need this sort of treatment. See, for
example, jtv's recent emergency Codehosting fix: it needed to skip ahead
of un-QA'd revisions. Cowboying may be appropriate here too. I don't
really know.

William.

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