nova team mailing list archive

[Rick Clark <rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/12/2010 04:59 PM, Soren Hansen wrote:
> In today's release meeting, someone mentioned dot releases and we
> decided to take it to the mailing list. This is me doing so.
> 
> In my dictionary, "dot releases" are "micro releases" that come out in
> between "real releases".
> We have Austin coming out in a couple of weeks, and Bexar is supposed to
> follow 3 months after that. A "dot release" of Austin would be another
> release based on Austin that adds some important bug fixes or similar
> that we find as we move along (typically backported from later releases).
> 
> As an example of a project that does this, Ubuntu designates every
> fourth release a "Long Term Support" release. These releases get a
> number of dot releases in their lifetime (i.e. support timeframe).
> "Regular" Ubuntu releases don't get dot releases.
> 
> I don't think we'll want to follow that particular pattern.

I would rather follow the pattern of KVM, that did not support or
backport patches until far down the line.


> Instead, I propose we stick to our three months' (or whatever we'll end
> up with) cadence. With such frequent releases, the burden of maintaining
> older releases significantly past their release date doesn't seem worth
> while for us as a project. However, if someone wants to maintain a
> stable branch of e.g. Austin, we let them do so within the project. The
> support and maintenance burden is primarily on them, but we provide the
> framework for them to do so. We need to work out in detail how this will
> work, of course, since their work will reflect upon the project as a whole.

The basic reason for not supporting and backporting patches is that the
rate of change in the code is still high.  Fixing bugs in old branches
might be completely different work.  We need to focus on moving the
project forward, right now.  When we reach a point that the rate of
change in the code has slowed and we are more feature complete we will
come up with a full plan to support multiple releases.  Until then, we
fix all bugs in trunk.


> As a notable exception, as Ubuntu is our primary distribution channel, I
> expect we'll take it upon ourselves to maintain the versions of
> OpenStack that end up getting included in Ubuntu's LTS's, but other than
> that, I'd like it to be up to someone else.
> 
> Thoughts?
>

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