Developer Mailing List Digest February 17-23rd

 

February 23, 2018

Helpful PTG links

PTG is around the corner. Here are some helpful links:

Success Bot Says

  • mhayden got centos OSA gate under 2h today
  • thingee: we have an on-boarding page and documentation for new contributors! [0]
  • Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#success <comment>”
  • More: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Successes

Thanks Bot Says

  • Thanks pkovar for keep the Documentation team going!
  • Thanks pabelanger and infra for getting ubuntu mirrors repaired and backup quickly!
  • Thanks lbragstad for helping troubleshoot an intermittent fernet token validation failure in puppet gates
  • Thanks TheJulia for helping me with a problem last week, it was really a networking problem issue, like you said so 🙂
  • Thanks tosky for backporting devstack ansible changes to pike!
  • Thanks thingee for Thanks Bot
  • Thanks openstackstatus for logging our things
  • Thanks strigazi for the v1.9.3 image
  • Thanks smcginnis for not stopping this.
  • Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#thanks <comment>”
  • More: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Thanks

Community Summaries

  • TC report [0]
  • POST /api-sig/news [1]
  • Release countdown [2]

Vancouver Community Contributor Awards

The Community contributor awards gives recognition to those that are undervalued, don’t know they’re appreciated, bind the community together, keep things fun, or challenge some norm. There are a lot of people out there that could use a pat on the back and affirmation that they do good work in the community.
Nomination period is open now [0] until May 14th. Winners will be announced in feedback session at Vancouver.

Release Naming For S – time to suggest a name!

It’s time to pick a name for our “S” release! Since the associated Summit will be in Berlin, the Geographic location has been chosen as “Berlin” (state). Nominations are now open [0]. Rules and processes can be seen on the Governance site [1].

Final Queens RC Deadline

Thursday 22nd of April is the deadline for any final Queens release candidates. We’ll enter a quiet period for a week in preparation of tagging the final Queens release during the PTG week. Make sure if  you have patches merged to stable/queens that you propose a new RC before the deadline. PTLs should watch for a patch from the release management team tagging the final release. While not required, an acknowledgement on the patch would be appreciated.

Do Not Import oslo_db.tests.*

Deprecations were made on oslo_db.sqlalchemy.test_base package of DbFixture and DbTestCase. In a patch [0], and assumption was made to that these should be imported from oslo_db.tests.sqlalchemy. Cinder, Ironic and Glance have been found with this issue [1].
Unfortunately these were not prefixed with underscores to comply with naming conventions for people to recognize private code. The tests module was included for consumers to run those tests on their own packages easily.

Some New Zuul Features

Default timeout is 30 minutes for “post-run” phase of the job. A new attribute “timeout” [0] can set this to something else, which could be useful for a job that performs a long artifact upload.
Two new job attributes added “host-vars” and “group-vars” [1] which behave like “vars” but applies to a specific host or group.

Developer Mailing List Digest February 10-16th

 

February 16, 2018

Please help shape the future of the Developer Mailing List Digest with this two question survey: https://openstackfoundation.formstack.com/forms/openstack_developer_digest_feedback
Contribute to the Dev Digest by summarizing OpenStack Dev List threads:

Success Bot Says

  • None for this week. Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#success <comment>”

Thanks Bot Says

  • diablo_rojo on #openstack-101 [0]: spotz for watching the #openstack-101 channel and helping to point newcomers to good resources to get them started 🙂
  • fungi on #openstack-infra [1]: dmsimard and mnaser for getting deep-linking in ara working for firefox
  • fungi on #openstack-infra [2]: to Matt Van Winkle for volunteering to act as internal advocate at Rackspace for our control plane account there!
  • AJaeger on #openstack-doc [3]: corvus for deleting /draft content
  • AJaeger on #openstack-infra [4]: cmurphy for your investigation
  • AJaeger on #openstack-infra [5]: to mordred for laying wonderful groundwork with the tox_siblings work.
  • smcginnis on #openstack-infra [6]: fungi jeblair mordred AJaeger and other infra-team members for clearing up release job issues
  • fungi on #openstack-infra [7]: zuul v3 for having such detailed configuration syntax error reporting.
  • fungi on #openstack-dev [8]: diablo_rojo and persia for smooth but “rocky” ptl elections!
  • Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#thanks <comment>”

Community Summaries

  • Nova Placement update [0]
  • Release Countdown [1]
  • TC Report [2]
  • Technical Committee Status update [3]

PTG Bot HOWTO for Dublin

The third PTG is an event where topics of discussion are loosely scheduled in tracks to maximize the attendee productivity. To keep track of what’s happening currently we have an event schedule page [0]. Below are some helpful discussions in using PTG bot:

Track Leads

Track leads will be able issue various commands [1] in irc channel #openstack-ptg:
  • #TRACK now <what’s being discussed>
  • example: #swift now brainstorming improvements to the ring.
  • Cross project interactions #TRACK now <what’s being discussed with other #TRACK>:
  • #nova now discussing #cinder interactions
  • What’s next #TRACK next <what will be discussed>:
  • #api-sig next at 2pm we’ll be discussing pagination woes
  • Clear all now and next entries for a track #TRACK clean:
  • #ironic clean

Booking Reservable Rooms

Reservable rooms and what’s being discussed works the same with it showing on the event schedule page [0].
Different set of commands:
  • Get the slot codes with the book command:
  • #TRACK book
  • #TRACK book <slot_code>
  • example: #relmgt book Coiste Bainisti-MonP2
Any track can book additional space. These slots are 1 hour and 45 minutes long. You can ask ttx, diablo_rojo or #openstack-infra to add a track that’s missing. Keep in mind various teams will be soley relying on this for space at the PTG.
Additional commands can be found in the PTG bot README [1].

PTL Election Results and Conclusions

PTL election is over and the results are in [0]! Congrats to returning and new PTLs!
There were three elections that took place:
  • Kolla [1]
  • Mistral [2]
  • Quality Assurance [3]
On the statistics side, we renewed 17 of the 64 PTLs, so around 27%. Our usual renewal rate is more around 35%, but we did renew more at the last elections (40%) so this is likely why we didn’t renew as much as usual this time. Much thanks to our election officials for carrying out this important responsibility in our community!

Election Process Tweaks

Discussions have started with ways to improve our election process. Current scripts in place have become brittle that are needed for governance documentation building that use gerrit lookup functions. Election officials currently have to make changes to an exception file [0] when email address with foundation accounts don’t match gerrit.
Discussed improvements include:
  • Uncouple TC and PTL election processes.
  • Make TC and PTL validation functions separate.
  • Change how-to-submit-candidacy directions to requires candidates email address to match their gerrit and foundation account.
Comments, concerns and better ideas are welcome. The plan is to schedule time at the PTG to start hacking on some of those items so feedback before then would be appreciated by your election officials!

Developer Mailing List Digest February 3-9th

 

February 9, 2018

Please help shape the future of the Developer Mailing List Digest with this two question survey: https://openstackfoundation.formstack.com/forms/openstack_developer_digest_feedback

Success Bot Says

  • stephenfin on #openstack-nova [0]: After 3 years and 7 (?) releases, encryption between nova’s consoleproxy service and compute nodes is finally possible ✌️
  • AJaeger on #openstack-infra [1]: zuul and nodepool feature/zuulv3 branches have merged into master
  • ildikov on #openstack-nova [2]: OpenStack now supports to attach a Cinder volume to multiple VM instances managed by Nova.
  • mriedem on #openstack-nova [3]: osc-placement 1.0.0 released; you can now do things with resource providers/classes via OSC CLI now.
  • AJaeger on #openstack-infra [4]: All tox jobs have been converted to Zuul v3 native syntax, run-tox.sh is gone.
  • ttx on #openstack-dev [5]: All teams have at least one candidate for PTL for the Rocky cycle! Might be the first time.
  • Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#success <comment>”

Community Summaries

  • Release countdown [0]
  • Nova placement resource provider update [1]
  • TC Report [2]
  • POST /api-sig/news [3]
  • Technical Committee Status Update [4]

Dublin PTG Schedule is Up

PTG schedule is available [0]. A lot of rooms are available Monday/Tuesday to discuss additional topics that take half a day and can be requested [1]. For small things (90 min discussions) we can book them dyncamically during the event with the new PTG bot features. Follow the thread for updates to the schedule [2].

Last Chance for PTG Dublin Tickets

PTG tickets for Dublin were sold out this week, and the Foundation received many requests for more tickets. Working with the venue to accommodate the extra capacity, every additional attendee incrementally increases costs to $600. It’s understood the importance of this event and the need to have key team members present, so the OpenStack Foundation has negotiated an additional 100 tickets and will partially subsidize to be at sold at $400 [0].

New Zuul Depends-On Syntax

Recently introduced url-based syntax for Depends-On: footer in your commit message:
    
    Depends-On: https://review.openstack.org/535851
Old syntax will continue to work for a while, but please begin using the new syntax. Zuul has grown the ability to talk to multiple backend systems (Gerrit, Git and plain Git so far).
From a change in gerrit you could have:
    
Or from a Github pull request:
    Depends-On: https://review.openstack.org/536159
    
Tips and certain cases contained further in the full message.

Call For Mentors and Funding

The Outreachy program [0] helps people of underrepresented groups get involved in free and open source software by matching interns with established mentors in the upstream community.
OpenStack will be participating in Outreachy May 2018 to August 2018. Application period opens on February 12th.
Interested mentors should publish their project ideas [1]. You can read more information about being a mentor [2].
Interested sponsors [3] can help provide a stipend to interns for a three month program.

Community Goals for Rocky

TC voted by not approved yet:
  • Remove mox [0]
  • Toggle the debug option at runtime [1]
Comment now on the two selected goals, or the TC will approve them and they’ll be discussed at the PTG.

End of PTL Nominations

Official candidate list available [0]. There are 0 projects without candidates, so the TC will not have to appoint an PTL’s.
Three projects will have elections: Kolla, QA and Mistral.

User Group Newsletter – January 2018

 

January 16, 2018

Welcome to 2018!

 

Important Vancouver Summit Updates

The countdown is on until the next Summit in May. Below are some important updates regarding CFP, Travel and Summit Passes

  • CFP is now open!

Call for presentations are now open for the Vancouver Summit. The deadline to submit your proposal is February 8th.

There are some new changes to the structure of the CFP, such as track organisation. Read more here. 

  • Summit Passes and Hotels

These sold quick in 2015 when we last went to Vancouver, don’t miss out and secure yours today. You can do so here. 

  • Visas

For information regarding Visa applications and invitation letters, read about it here.

As a general planning guideline, if a visa is needed, a foreign traveler should apply for his or her visa as soon as possible, preferably no later than 60 days before the travel date.

  • Travel Support Program

The Travel Support Program (TSP) aims to facilitate participation of key contributors to the OpenStack Summit by covering the costs for their travel and accommodations. The grants will cover a combination of flights, accommodation, and access pass to the Summit. More details here.

All contributors to OpenStack (developers, documentation writers, organizers of user groups around the world, Ask moderators, speakers, translators, etc) are invited to submit a request. You can apply by filling out this form.

  • More Questions?

Got any other questions about the Summit? There is an excellent FAQ here. 

Ops Meetup Tokyo

The next OpenStack Ops Meetup is happening March 6-7 in Tokyo.

Register here.

Information from Wiki

Project Teams Gathering (PTG)

The Project Teams Gathering (PTG) in Dublin February 26 – March 2. It’s an event for anyone who self-identifies as a member in a specific given project team as well as operators who are specialists on a given project and willing to spend their time giving feedback on their use case and contributing their usage experience to the project team.

Upcoming Industry Events

FOSDEM

The Foundation will be present at FOSDEM in Brussels, February 3-4 2018.

OpenStack booth will be in building K, level 1

https://fosdem.org/2018

OpenStack delivers a keynote at Chaosscon

Feb 2, 2018 in Brussels

http://grimoirelab.github.io/con/

Upcoming CFP

LF Open Source Leadership

Closing date: January 21, 2018

OSCON 2018

Closing Date: January 30, 2018

LinuxCon ContainerCon | CloudOpen China

Closing Date: March 4, 2018

ONS Europe

Closing Date: June 24, 2018

OpenStack Technical Committee E-office Hours

The TC has e-office hours each week to field any questions you may have.

Find out more details here:
https://governance.openstack.org/tc/

Developer Mailing List Digest January 5-12th

 

January 12, 2018

Success Bot Says

  • e0ne on #openstack-horizon [0]: amotoki runs horizon with django 2.0
  • tristianC on #rdo [1]: review.rdoproject.org is now running sf-2.7
  • mriedem on #openstack-nova [2]: nova merged alternate hosts support for server build
  • mriedem on #openstack-nova [3]: After a week of problems, finally got a volume multiattach test run to actually attach a volume to two instances without melting the world. \o/
  • Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#success <comment>”

Community Goals for Rocky

So far one goal has been proposed by Kendall Nelson for migrating to Storyboard. It was agreed to postpone the goal until the S cycle, as it could take longer than six months to achieve. There is a good backlog of goals [0], just no champions. It’ll be bad for momentum if we have a cycle with no community wide goal.

PTG Post-lunch Presentations

Feedback received from past PTG session(s) was the lack of situational awareness and missed opportunity for “global” communication at the event. In Dublin we’d used the end of the lunch break to for communications that could be interesting to OpenStack upstream developers and project team members. The idea is not to find a presentation for everyday, but if we find content that is generally useful. Interesting topics include general guidance to make the most of the PTG weeks (good Monday content), development tricks, code review etiquette, new library features you should adopt, lightning talks (good Friday content). We’d like to keep the slot under 20 minutes. If you have ideas please fill out this etherpad [0] in a few weeks.

User Group Newsletter December 2017

 

December 20, 2017

Summit recap

With 2300+ attendees and 54 countries represented, it was a fantastic week in Sydney. Thank you to all who attended!

You can catch all the action from the Keynotes here. The Summit talk videos are live, find them here. Superuser also covered the Summit with an awesome article covering 50 things you need to know.

Next Summit

Our next Summit destination is in Vancouver. Registration and Hotel booking are now available. Last time we went to Canada, these sold out quick. Don’t miss out and secure yours today.

Congratulations to SuperUser award winners!

On the final day of the Sydney Summit, the Community Contributor Awards gave a special tip of the hat to those who might not know how much they are valued. Read more about the ceremony here.  

Stay tuned to Superuser and OpenStack’s social channels for when nominations open for Vancouver.

2018 CFP dates

Cloud Native Con/KubeCon Europe

Closing date: January 12, 2018

ONS 2018

Closing date: January 14, 2018

LF Open Source Leadership

Closing date: January 21, 2018

OSCON 2018

Closing Date: January 30, 2018

LinuxCon ContainerCon | CloudOpen China

Closing Date: March 4, 2018

ONS Europe

Closing Date: June 24, 2018

Superuser articles of interest

Some fantastic Superuser articles have been published in recent weeks. They include tutorials, information about a new working group and project updates.

Making your first contact with OpenStack

Check out these OpenStack project updates

Working together: OpenStack and Kubernetes

Travel grants support global community to attend OpenStack Summit

How to use OpenStack Glance Image Import

Launch of Kata Containers

The Foundation is excited to announce Kata Containers. This project unites the security advantages of virtual machines with the speed and manageability of containers for running container management tools directly on bare metal without sacrificing workload isolation. Kata Containers delivers increased performance, faster boot time and cost efficiencies. Kata Containers will have its own governance, community and communication channels.

To find out more and get involved:
Sign up for Kata Containers updates at katacontainers.io

Get involved on the Kata Containers Mailing List, Slack* and IRC* (#kata-dev)

Follow Kata Containers on Twitter: @katacontainers

HPC book update

The Scientific Working Group has updated the Crossroads of Cloud and HPC: OpenStack for Scientific Research. Version 2 of the popular book details multiple enhancements made to OpenStack for HPC workloads over the past year and added several new in-depth case studies on how OpenStack supports radio astronomy, bioinformatics, cancer and genome research and more. Read or order the book at https://www.openstack.org/science/ to find out exactly how OpenStack allows researchers to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time on research that matters. To learn more or get involved in the Scientific Working Group, visit https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Scientific_SIG

THANK YOU!

It has been a fantastic 2017!!! Thank you to all community members for your industrious efforts and contributions! Wish you all a Happy Holiday break and a great New Year.

 

Developer Mailing List Digest December 9-15th

 

December 16, 2017

Success Bot Says

  • mordred on #openstack-sdks: “Finished the shade transition to pure REST away from client libs” [0]
  • Tell us yours in OpenStack IRC channels using the command “#success <comment>”

Community Summaries

  • TC report 50 [0]
  • POST /api-sig/news [1]
  • Release countdown [2]
  • Technical Committee Status Update [3]
  • Resource Providers Update 45 [4]

Switching to Longer Development Cycles

Our self-imposed rhythm no longer matches our natural pace. Our elections, feature freezes feel like they’re around the corner, and due to that, we’re losing time from them, as multiple people have stated. The pace was designed around more people contributing full time to OpenStack, but lately, we have composite jobs, or were participating in multiple communities (which is great!).
It means:
  • One OpenStack coordinated release per year.
  • Maintain one stable branch per year.
  • Elect PTLs once a year.
  • One set of community goals per year.
  • One PTG per year.
Any project that still wants to release often can use the cycle-with-intermediary release model [0]. At a minimum, we’ll release once a year. Teams can choose to revive midcycle if they need to meet more than the one PTG each year. We’ll have more time for community-wide goals, so we will have more time to complete or even set more ambitious goals.
This doesn’t simplify upgrades. While upgrading every year is incrementally better than being forced to upgrade every 6 months. The real solution is better support for skipping releases.
It also doesn’t give us LTS. The cost of maintaining branches is not really due to the number of them in parallel, it’s due to the age of the oldest one. The real solution here is being discussed by the (still forming) LTS SIG. Extending stability periods is per-project at this point, and the proposal has yet to address a coordinated stability period.
We’re doing a year because of the way the events are organized. It’s suggested to start for the Rocky release and have the single PTG in 2018 in Dublin. The release team is opening the discussion to the community, and the TC will give a final decision.
Various cons were expressed, like this causing a rush to get in code at the end of a release to avoid having to wait an entire year. Projects are also forced to do compatibility support for versioned APIs, config files, etc since projects would be unable to drop compatibility in an intermediate release. Projects like Grenade will have to support the cases of some projects doing intermediate releases, and those doing yearly.
For the people that spend 20% of their time contributing to OpenStack, it has been voiced that it takes time to get a feature merged and the current cycle makes it impossible. This longer development cycle could help with allowing more time for those people. Various people expressed that we should be looking at the root cause of helping our part-time contributors, as the length of the cycle is unlikely the cause. People who can only contribute 20% of their time are also likely to deal with rebase conflicts, instead of focusing on their code.
Having a year could also impose having intermediate releases so specifications that can have multiple times a year to be approved. If that’s the idea, however, then it’s causing stress on the core team by having to match these precise schedules, in which the proposal was aiming to ease. It was a concern that this more solves the problem of giving more opportunities to people to get their spec/new feature considered.
This topic has also been brought up by various times in the past. Someone noted Daniel Berrange’s thread [1]

Zuul Dashboard Available

In addition to the Zuul dashboard [0] showing the “Status”, there are additional tabs added. “Jobs” page shows a list of all jobs in the system and their descriptions. The “Builds” page lists the most recent runs. You can query pipeline, job, and project.

Security SIG

Following previous mailing list discussions [0], the Security Project will be changing into a Special Interest Group (SIG). SIGs have shown to be a good match for the activity the group does around a topic or practice that spans around the community of developers, operators, and users. The group will continue to manage and care for the Security Guide, OSSNs, Bandit, Thread Reviews, Syntribos as well as encourage and incubate new security projects. The group will continue to work with the VMT and will keep a Sec-core group for launchpad that can work with the embargoes issues.

Cycle Highlights Reminder

As we get closer to Queens-3 and our final RCs, a reminder is given about the new ‘cycle-highlights’ that has been added to deliverable info. Background of why this was added, some PTLs were being pinged multiple times every release cycle by various people like journalists, product manager and other to compile the same information. To mitigate that, we have a way to capture highlights as part of the release. This will give basic information, but not as a complete marketing message.
This is done in the openstack/releases repository in the deliverables/queens/$PROJECT.yaml file formatted like so:
    cycle-highlights:
        – Introduced new service to use the unsed host to mine bitcoin.
We have three different places that document activities for three different audiences:
Commit messages: Developer documentation
Release notes: End-user and deployer documentation
Cycle highlights: Journalists, product manager, and others.

Community Goals For Rocky

Some questions to ask ourselves: What common challenges do we have, and who is willing to drive that community-wide goal (aka champion).
A champion is someone who drives a goal but doesn’t commit to writing code necessarily. The champion will communicate with project PTLs about the goal, and make the liaison if needed.
The list of ideas for community-wide goals is collected on this etherpad [0]. Propose some ideas now!

Developer Mailing List Digest November 25 to December 1st

 

December 4, 2017

News

  • Project Team Gather (PTG) in Dublin registration is live [0]

Community Summaries

  • TC report by Chris Dent [0]
  • Release countdown [1]
  • Technical Committee Status updated [2]
  • POST /api-sig/news [3]
  • Nova notification update [4]
  • Nova placement resource providers update [5]

Dublin PTG Format

We will continue themes as we did in Denver (Monday-Tuesday), but shorter times like half days. Flexibility is added for other groups to book the remaining available rooms in 90-min slots on-demand driven by the PTG Bot (Wednesday-Friday.

First Contact SIG

A wiki has been created for the group [0]. The group is looking for intersted people being points of contact for newcomers and what specified time zones. Resource links like contributor portal, mentoring wiki, Upstream Institute, outreachy are being collected on the wiki page. A representative from the operators side to chair and represent would be good.

Policy Goal Queens-2 Update

Queens-2 coming to a close, we recap our community wide goal for policies [0]. If you want your status changed, contact Lance Bragstad. Use the topic policy-and-docs-in-code for tracking related code changes.

Not Started

  • openstack/ceilometer
  • openstack/congress
  • openstack/networking-bgpvpn
  • openstack/networking-midonet
  • openstack/networking-odl
  • openstack/neutron-dynamic-routing
  • openstack/neutron-fwaas
  • openstack/neutron-lib
  • openstack/solum
  • openstack/swift

In Progress

  • openstack/barbican
  • openstack/cinder
  • openstack/cloudkitty
  • openstack/glance
  • openstack/heat
  • openstack/manila
  • openstack/mistral
  • openstack/neutron
  • openstack/panko
  • openstack/python-heatclient
  • openstack/tacker
  • openstack/tricircle
  • openstack/trove
  • openstack/vitrage
  • openstack/watcher
  • openstack/zaqar

Completed

  • openstack/designate
  • openstack/freezer
  • openstack/ironic
  • openstack/keystone
  • openstack/magnum
  • openstack/murano
  • openstack/nova
  • openstack/octavia
  • openstack/sahara
  • openstack/searchlight
  • openstack/senlin
  • openstack/zun

Tempest Plugin Split Goal

A list of open reviews [0] is available for the Tempest plugin split goal [1].

Not Started

  • Congress
  • ec2-api
  • freezer
  • mistral
  • monasca
  • senlin
  • tacker
  • Telemetry
  • Trove
  • Vitrage

In Progress

  • Cinder
  • Heat
  • Ironic
  • magnum
  • manila
  • Neutron
  • murano
  • networking-l2gw
  • octavia

Completed

  • Barbican
  • CloudKitty
  • Designate
  • Horizon
  • Keystone
  • Kuryr
  • Sahara
  • Solum
  • Tripleo
  • Watcher
  • Winstackers
  • Zaqar
  • Zun

Developer Mailing List Digest November 18-27

 

November 27, 2017

Community Summaries

  • Glance priorities [0]
  • Nova placement resource provider update [1]
  • Keystone Upcoming Deadlines [2]
  • Ironic priorities and subteam reports [3]
  • Keystone office hours [4]
  • Nova notification update [5]
  • Release countdown [6]
  • Technical committee status update [7]

Self-healing SIG created

Adam Spiers announced the formation of a SIG around self-healing. Its scope is to coordinate the use and development of several OpenStack projects which can be combined in various ways to manage OpenStack infrastructure in a policy-driven fashion, reacting to failures and other events by automatically healing and optimising services.

Proposal for a QA SIG

A proposal to to have a co-existing QA special interest group (SIG) that would be a place for downstream efforts to have a common place in collaborating and sharing tests. Example today the OPNFV performs QA on OpenStack releases today and are actively looking for opportunities to share tools and test cases. While a SIG can exist to do some code, the QA team will remain for now since there are around 15 QA projects existing like Tempest and Grenade.

Improving the Process for Release Marketing

Collecting and summarizing “top features” during release time is difficult for both PTL’s and Foundation marketing. A system is now in place for PTL’s to highlight release notes [0]. Foundation marketing will work with the various teams if needed to understand and make things more press friendly.

Developer Mailing List Digest November 11-17

 

November 17, 2017

Summaries

  • POST /api-sig/news [0]
  • Release countdown for week R-14, November 18-24 [1]

[0] – http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-November/124633.html
[1] – http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-November/124631.html

 

Upstream Long Term Support Releases

The Sydney Summit had a very well attended and productive session [0] about to go about keeping a selection of past releases available and maintained for long term support (LTS).

In the past the community has asked for people who are interested in old branches being maintained for a long time to join the Stable Maintenance team with the premise that if the stable team grew, it could support more branches for longer periods. This has been repeated for about years and is not working.

This discussion is about allowing collaboration on patches beyond end of life (EOL) and enable whoever steps up to maintain longer lived branches to come up with a set of tests that actually match their needs with tests that would be less likely to bitrot due to changing OS/PYPI substrate. We need to lower expectations of what we’re likely to produce will get more brittle the older the branch gets. Any burden created by taking on more work is absorbed by people doing the work, as does not unduly impact the folks not interested in doing the work.

The idea is to continue the current stable policy more or less as it is. Development teams take responsibility of a couple of stable branches. At some point what we now call an EOL branch, instead of deleting it we would leave it open and establish a new team of people who want to continue to main that branch. It’s anticipated the members of those new teams are coming mostly from users and distributors. Not all branches are going to attract teams to maintain them, and that’s OK.

We will stop tagging these branches so the level of support they provide are understood. Backports and other fixes can be shared, but to consume them, a user will have to build their own packages.

Test jobs will run as they are, and the team that maintain the branch could decide how to deal with them. Fixing the jobs upstream where possible is preferred, but depending on who is maintaining the branch, the level of support they are actually providing and the nature of the breakage, removing individual tests or whole jobs is another option. Using third-party testing came up but is not required.

Policies for the new team being formed to maintain these older branches is being discussed in an etherpad [2].

Some feedback in the room expressed they to start one release a year who’s branch isn’t deleted after a year. Do one release a year and still keep N-2 stable releases around. We still do backports to all open stable branches. Basically do what we’re doing now, but once a year.

Discussion on this suggestion extended to the OpenStack SIG mailing list [1] suggesting that skip-release upgrades are a much better way to deal with upgrade pain than extending cycles. Releasing every year instead of a 6 months means our releases will contain more changes, and the upgrade could become more painful. We should be release often as we can and makes the upgrades less painful so versions can be skipped.

We have so far been able to find people to maintain stable branches for 12-18 months. Keep N-2 branches for annual releases open would mean extending that support period to 2+ years. If we’re going to do that, we need to address how we are going to retain contributors.

When you don’t release often enough, the pressure to get a patch “in” increases. Missing the boat and waiting for another year is not bearable.

[0] – https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/SYD-forum-upstream-lts-releases
[1] – http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-sigs/2017-November/000149.html
[2] – https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/LTS-proposal