[Gluster-Maintainers] Patches being posted by Facebook and plans thereof

[Shyam]

Hi,

You may have noticed that Facebook has started posting their patches to 
the newly created release-3.8-fb branch. The patches posted can be seen 
here [1].

The total possible set of patches that Facebook may post is ~300, this 
number may reduce based on fixes for issues that Facebook engineers 
already find in the 3.8 main branch, or things that they have already 
posted earlier and are part of the 3.8 code base.


This effort is a voluntary and welcome contribution by Facebook to the 
rest of the Gluster community. This is really exciting and something 
we've wanted to encourage for a really long time, so we’re going to need 
everyone’s help to get this underway from here.

The plan to help make the above a reality (as exchanged with Facebook 
engineers) is as follows:

1) Facebook will port all their patches to the special branch 
release-3.8-fb, where they have exclusive merge rights.

2) Facebook will also be porting the fixes and features into the Gluster 
master branch. This is to ensure that their work is incorporated after 
required due diligence around reviews, testing, etc. into master.

3) We request other members of the Gluster development community to keep 
a watch on the release-3.8-fb branch and pick out patches of interest, 
and help in the activity of porting these patches to master. This will 
ensure quicker movement of patches to master and hence deliver the 
overall value of these patches to the broader community.

Maintainers, this is your explicit invitation to come participate.

4) At some future point, master would have caught up with release-3.8-fb 
branch, and hence the next LTM/STM release would have the same for 
general availability.
   - The current desired target is 3.11 STM for this activity to complete

5) Also, there are some useful/big/interesting features in the patches 
that may need more attention. Please participate in understanding these 
in more detail as soon as you can! Helping move these to master or 
extending them will help this process of merging features greatly.
   - Some such features would be: Halo, GFProxy, multi-threaded 
rebalance improvements, IPv6 changes, io-stats changes, throttling

We will attempt to build some form of a tracker that lists patches in 
release-3.8-fb and missing in master (or vice-versa), to enable quicker 
participation by the community when attempting to choose which patch to 
take a stab at.

Finally, thanks to Facebook for taking this initiative to strengthen our 
community, and for hosting some of us in their Cambridge,MA office to 
kick this off.

Gluster devs, our turn now to make this happen!

Regards,
Amye, Jeff, Shyam, Vijay

[1] Facebook patches against release-3.8-fb branch:
http://review.gluster.org/#/q/project:glusterfs+branch:release-3.8-fb