openstack team mailing list archive

[Duncan McGreggor <duncan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 06 Dec 2011 - 21:14, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Tim Bell wrote:
> > I'm not clear on who will be maintaining the stable/diablo  branch.
> > The people such as EPEL for RedHat systems need to have something
> > with the appropriate bug fixes back ported.
> >
> > There are an increasing number of sites looking to deploy in
> > production and cannot follow the latest development version.
>
> Agreed on the need, we discussed this at length during the design
> summit. The stable branches have been established and are maintained by
> the "OpenStack Stable Branch Maintainers" team. Currently this team is
> mostly made of distribution members (Ubuntu and Fedora/RedHat, mostly)
> collaborating on a single branch to avoid duplication of effort.
>
> See:
> https://launchpad.net/~openstack-stable-maint
> http://wiki.openstack.org/StableBranch

Okay, I think this mostly addresses item #4 that I wanted to add to your
summary, Thierry.

I do have the following minor concerns, though:

 * that wiki page's summary (intro sentence) only specifically mentions
   Diablo; I'd like to see something along the lines of "currently
   focusing on Diablo. If these processes evolve into a successful
   model, they will be applied to all future releases."

 * the discussion on the page treats this as an experiment (this is
   good!), but I'd like to see a phrase alone the lines of "if this
   experiment is successful, we will do X to ensure these processes
   become an official part of the workflow."

These are tiny things, but I think they will better set expectations and
give more warm fuzzies to organizations thinking about deploying
OpenStack in production environments, seeing that we're considering the
long-term (given success of the experiment).

In addition, I would like to emphasize Tim's point from earlier, though:
it's not just packaging... he said it very well, so I'll quote:

> Tim Bell wrote:
> > We need more than 'just' packaging.... it is using the testing,
> > documentation and above all care to produce *and* maintain a stable
> > release that production sites can rely on for 6-12 months and know
> > that others are relying on it too.

I would like to see verbage reflecting Tim's concerns added to the wiki
page as well.

 * What is the QA/testing story?

 * What is the documentation story?

 * What is the support cycle story?

Ghe Rivero, Michael Pittaro, Tim Bell: does the stable maintenance team
address your concerns?

d