[Gluster-devel] [Gluster-users] Idea: Alternate Release process
Raghavendra Talur
rtalur at redhat.com
Thu May 19 05:59:10 UTC 2016
On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 11:13 AM, Kaushal M <kshlmster at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm in favour of a stable release every 2 months and an LTS once a
> year (option 2).
>
+1
>
> As Oleksander already suggested, I'm in favour of having well defined
> merge windows, freeze dates and testing period.
> (A slightly modified timeline from Oleksander's proposal follows)
> For every 2 month window,
> - 1 month of development (merge window). New features will not be
> accepted post this period.
> - At the end of the development period a release-candidate 1 is tagged.
> - A 1 month testing/bug-fixing window follows. This time is for
> testing and fixing bugs found.
> Feature development and reviews can happen during this period on
> gerrit, but nothing gets merged. Merges will be held till the next
> merge window.
>
This means the branching is not done at the end of merge window and the
patches will not be merged even on the master branch. Is that right?
- At least 2 more release-candidates will be release once every fortnight
> - The final release-candidate becomes the release if it passes all our
> tests.
>
> One of the 6 releases of the year will become a LTS release.
> The 2 month window for this release will mainly be targeted at making
> the release stable.
> New features should be minimal for this release.
>
I really like this point. Taking 3.8 as a LTS release this would mean new
features for 3.14 release would not be encouraged.
>
> During every 2 month window, the LTS release will get any required bug
> fixes and stability improvements backported.
> For fix to be backported it needs to be present in a stable release.
>
+1
>
> ~kaushal
>
> On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 11:46 PM, Atin Mukherjee <amukherj at redhat.com>
> wrote:
> > A bit late but better than never. My vote is for option 2.
> >
> > ~Atin
> >
> > On 05/18/2016 07:19 PM, Vijay Bellur wrote:
> >> [Adding gluster-users]
> >>
> >> I would like to wrap this poll by the next community meeting on 25th
> >> May. Can you please weigh in with your opinions on the options
> >> provided by Aravinda?
> >>
> >> Thanks!
> >> Vijay
> >>
> >>
> >> On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 4:16 AM, Aravinda <avishwan at redhat.com> wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> Based on the discussion in last community meeting and previous
> discussions,
> >>>
> >>> 1. Too frequent releases are difficult to manage.(without dedicated
> release
> >>> manager)
> >>> 2. Users wants to see features early for testing or POC.
> >>> 3. Backporting patches to more than two release branches is pain
> >>>
> >>> Enclosed visualizations to understand existing release and support
> cycle and
> >>> proposed alternatives.
> >>>
> >>> - Each grid interval is 6 months
> >>> - Green rectangle shows supported release or LTS
> >>> - Black dots are minor releases till it is supported(once a month)
> >>> - Orange rectangle is non LTS release with minor releases(Support ends
> when
> >>> next version released)
> >>>
> >>> Enclosed following images
> >>> 1. Existing Release cycle and support plan(6 months release cycle, 3
> >>> releases supported all the time)
> >>> 2. Proposed alternative 1 - One LTS every year and non LTS stable
> release
> >>> once in every 2 months
> >>> 3. Proposed alternative 2 - One LTS every year and non LTS stable
> release
> >>> once in every 3 months
> >>> 4. Proposed alternative 3 - One LTS every year and non LTS stable
> release
> >>> once in every 4 months
> >>> 5. Proposed alternative 4 - One LTS every year and non LTS stable
> release
> >>> once in every 6 months (Similar to existing but only alternate one will
> >>> become LTS)
> >>>
> >>> Please do vote for the proposed alternatives about release intervals
> and LTS
> >>> releases. You can also vote for the existing plan.
> >>>
> >>> Do let me know if I missed anything.
> >>>
> >>> regards
> >>> Aravinda
> >>>
> >>> On 05/11/2016 12:01 AM, Aravinda wrote:
> >>>
> >>> I couldn't find any solution for the backward incompatible changes. As
> you
> >>> mentioned this model will not work for LTS.
> >>>
> >>> How about adopting this only for non LTS releases? We will not have
> backward
> >>> incompatibility problem since we need not release minor updates to non
> LTS
> >>> releases.
> >>>
> >>> regards
> >>> Aravinda
> >>>
> >>> On 05/05/2016 04:46 PM, Aravinda wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> regards
> >>> Aravinda
> >>>
> >>> On 05/05/2016 03:54 PM, Kaushal M wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 11:48 AM, Aravinda <avishwan at redhat.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> Sharing an idea to manage multiple releases without maintaining
> >>> multiple release branches and backports.
> >>>
> >>> This idea is heavily inspired by the Rust release model(you may feel
> >>> exactly same except the LTS part). I think Chrome/Firefox also follows
> >>> the same model.
> >>>
> >>> http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/10/30/Stability.html
> >>>
> >>> Feature Flag:
> >>> --------------
> >>> Compile time variable to prevent compiling featurerelated code when
> >>> disabled. (For example, ./configure--disable-geo-replication
> >>> or ./configure --disable-xml etc)
> >>>
> >>> Plan
> >>> -----
> >>> - Nightly build with all the features enabled(./build --nightly)
> >>>
> >>> - All new patches will land in Master, if the patch belongs to a
> >>> existing feature then it should be written behind that feature flag.
> >>>
> >>> - If a feature is still work in progress then it will be only enabled
> in
> >>> nightly build and not enabled in beta or stable builds.
> >>> Once the maintainer thinks the feature is ready for testing then
> that
> >>> feature will be enabled in beta build.
> >>>
> >>> - Every 6 weeks, beta branch will be created by enabling all the
> >>> features which maintainers thinks it is stable and previous beta
> >>> branch will be promoted as stable.
> >>> All the previous beta features will be enabled in stable unless it
> >>> is marked as unstable during beta testing.
> >>>
> >>> - LTS builds are same as stable builds but without enabling all the
> >>> features. If we decide last stable build will become LTS release,
> >>> then the feature list from last stable build will be saved as
> >>> `features-release-<NUM>.yaml`, For example:
> >>> features-release-3.9.yaml`
> >>> Same feature list will be used while building minor releases for the
> >>> LTS. For example, `./build --stable --features
> features-release-3.8.yaml`
> >>>
> >>> - Three branches, nightly/master, testing/beta, stable
> >>>
> >>> To summarize,
> >>> - One stable release once in 6 weeks
> >>> - One Beta release once in 6 weeks
> >>> - Nightly builds every day
> >>> - LTS release once in 6 months or 1 year, Minor releases once in 6
> weeks.
> >>>
> >>> Advantageous:
> >>> -------------
> >>> 1. No more backports required to different release branches.(only
> >>> exceptional backports, discussed below)
> >>> 2. Non feature Bugfix will never get missed in releases.
> >>> 3. Release process can be automated.
> >>> 4. Bugzilla process can be simplified.
> >>>
> >>> Challenges:
> >>> ------------
> >>> 1. Enforcing Feature flag for every patch
> >>> 2. Tests also should be behind feature flag
> >>> 3. New release process
> >>>
> >>> Backports, Bug Fixes and Features:
> >>> ----------------------------------
> >>> - Release bug fix - Patch only to Master, which will be available in
> >>> next beta/stable build.
> >>> - Urgent bug fix - Patch to Master and Backport to beta and stable
> >>> branch, and early release stable and beta build.
> >>> - Beta bug fix - Patch to Master and Backport to Beta branch if urgent.
> >>> - Security fix - Patch to Master, Beta and last stable branch and build
> >>> all LTS releases.
> >>> - Features - Patch only to Master, which will be available in
> >>> stable/beta builds once feature becomes stable.
> >>>
> >>> FAQs:
> >>> -----
> >>> - Can a feature development take more than one release cycle(6 weeks)?
> >>> Yes, the feature will be enabled only in nightly build and not in
> >>> beta/stable builds. Once the feature is complete mark it as
> >>> stable so that it will be included in next beta build and stable
> >>> build.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> ---
> >>>
> >>> Do you like the idea? Let me know what you guys think.
> >>>
> >>> This reduces the number of versions that we need to maintain, which I
> like.
> >>> Having official test (beta) releases should help get features out to
> >>> testers hand faster,
> >>> and get quicker feedback.
> >>>
> >>> One thing that's still not quite clear to is the issue of backwards
> >>> compatibility.
> >>> I'm still thinking it thorough and don't have a proper answer to this
> yet.
> >>> Would a new release be backwards compatible with the previous release?
> >>> Should we be maintaining compatibility with LTS releases with the
> >>> latest release?
> >>>
> >>> Each LTS release will have seperate list of features to be enabled. If
> we
> >>> make any breaking changes(which are not backward compatible) then it
> will
> >>> affect LTS releases as you mentioned. But we should not break
> compatibility
> >>> unless it is major version change like 4.0. I have to workout how we
> can
> >>> handle backward incompatible changes.
> >>>
> >>> With our current strategy, we at least have a long term release branch,
> >>> so we get some guarantees of compatibility with releases on the same
> branch.
> >>>
> >>> As I understand the proposed approach, we'd be replacing a stable
> >>> branch with the beta branch.
> >>> So we don't have a long-term release branch (apart from LTS).
> >>>
> >>> Stable branch is common for LTS releases also. Builds will be different
> >>> using different list of features.
> >>>
> >>> Below example shows stable release once in 6 weeks, and two LTS
> releases in
> >>> 6 months gap(3.8 and 3.12)
> >>>
> >>> LTS 1 : 3.8 3.8.1 3.8.2 3.8.3 3.8.4 3.8.5...
> >>> LTS 2 : 3.12 3.12.1...
> >>> Stable: 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13...
> >>>
> >>> A user would be upgrading from one branch to another for every release.
> >>> Can we sketch out how compatibility would work in this case?
> >>>
> >>> User will not upgrade from one branch to other branch, If user
> interested in
> >>> stable channel then upgrade once in 6 weeks. (Same as minor update in
> >>> current release style)
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> This approach work well for projects like Chromium and Firefox, single
> >>> system apps
> >>> which generally don't need to be compatible with the previous
> release.
> >>> I don't understand how the Rust project uses this (I am yet to read
> >>> the linked blog post),
> >>> as it requires some sort of backwards compatibility. But it too is a
> >>> single system app,
> >>> and doesn't have the compatibility problems we face.
> >>>
> >>> Gluster is a distributed system, that can involve multiple different
> >>> versions interacting with each other.
> >>> This is something we need to think about.
> >>>
> >>> I need to think about compatibility, What new problems about the
> >>> compatibility with this approach compared to our existing release plan?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> We could work out some sort of a solution for this though.
> >>> It might be something very obvious I'm missing right now.
> >>>
> >>> ~kaushal
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> regards
> >>> Aravinda
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> Gluster-devel mailing list
> >>> Gluster-devel at gluster.org
> >>> http://www.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-devel
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
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> >>
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