openstack team mailing list archive

[Vishvananda Ishaya <vishvananda@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mar 1, 2012, at 5:21 AM, Soren Hansen wrote:

> 2012/2/28 Vishvananda Ishaya <vishvananda@xxxxxxxxx>:
>> There is always progress to be made, but while we are toiling away working
>> on testing, technical debt, and code smell, we have to keep our users in
>> mind.
> 
> This part of your e-mail really sticks out, along with this one:
> 
>> I disagree with this point. There was a huge amount of effort from a lot of
>> parties on getting things cleaned up during essex. Most of the "features"
>> that were worked on were getting things aligned and consistent behind our
>> api. We have to make sure that Nova is usable as well as stable. It is
>> tempting to think of things from the developer/code perspective, but we have
>> to put on our user/operator hats as well.
> 
> I'm trying hard to work out what you're implying here..
> 
> Are you suggesting that my suggested policy of not adding features,
> but focusing almost exclusively on stability isn't for the best of our
> users? Who do you think (I think) I'm favouring when I propose
> something like that?

It is great for some of our users.  I'm sure stability is high on everyone's list, but i think a number of the people building businesses around openstack would be upset that <insert_feature_here> won't be available for two releases. When I deal with customers during our deploys, they aren't complaining about stability, they are asking when feature x will be available.

My notes in the email were just a reminder that we need to keep everyone in mind. Packagers, deployers, developers and end-users all have different priorities. We have a huge community and we need to have a measured approach.

We just finished a month long soft feature freeze and are starting a month long hard freeze, so I'm not convinced that an even more extreme freeze is the right strategy. I think the idea of maturing features in focused branches and bugfixing in trunk is very interesting however, and has the potential to allow the stability we want without sacrificing feature development.  My only concern with this model is how we deal with smallish features that aren't clearly associated with a particular focused branch. Do we have a separate 'small-features' branch where things can mature?

Vish

> 
> -- 
> Soren Hansen             | http://linux2go.dk/
> Senior Software Engineer | http://www.cisco.com/
> Ubuntu Developer         | http://www.ubuntu.com/
> OpenStack Developer      | http://www.openstack.org/