[Gluster-Maintainers] Lock down period merge process

[Shyam Ranganathan]

Maintainers,

The following thread talks about a merge during a merge lockdown, with
differing view points (this mail is not to discuss the view points).

The root of the problem is that we leave the current process to good
faith. If we have a simple rule that we will not merge anything during a
lock down period, this confusion and any future repetitions of the same
would not occur.

I propose that we follow the simpler rule, and would like to hear
thoughts around this.

This also means that in the future, we may not need to remove commit
access for other maintainers, as we do *not* follow a good faith policy,
and instead depend on being able to revert and announce on the threads
why we do so.

Please note, if there are extraneous situations (say reported security
vulnerabilities that need fixes ASAP) we may need to loosen up the
stringency, as that would take precedence over the lock down. These
exceptions though, can be called out and hence treated as such.

Thoughts?

Shyam

PS: Added Yaniv to the CC as he reported the deviance

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [Gluster-devel] Release 5: Master branch health report
(Week of 30th July)
Date: 	Tue, 7 Aug 2018 23:22:09 +0300
From: 	Yaniv Kaul <ykaul at redhat.com>
To: 	Shyam Ranganathan <srangana at redhat.com>
CC: 	GlusterFS Maintainers <maintainers at gluster.org>, Gluster Devel
<gluster-devel at gluster.org>, Nigel Babu <nigelb at redhat.com>





On Tue, Aug 7, 2018, 10:46 PM Shyam Ranganathan <srangana at redhat.com
<mailto:srangana at redhat.com>> wrote:

    On 08/07/2018 02:58 PM, Yaniv Kaul wrote:
    >     The intention is to stabilize master and not add more patches
    that my
    >     destabilize it.
    >
    >
    > https://review.gluster.org/#/c/20603/ has been merged.
    > As far as I can see, it has nothing to do with stabilization and
    should
    > be reverted.

    Posted this on the gerrit review as well:

    <snip>
    4.1 does not have nightly tests, those run on master only.


That should change of course. We cannot strive for stability otherwise,
AFAIK. 


    Stability of master does not (will not), in the near term guarantee
    stability of release branches, unless patches that impact code already
    on release branches, get fixes on master and are back ported.

    Release branches get fixes back ported (as is normal), this fix and its
    merge should not impact current master stability in any way, and neither
    stability of 4.1 branch.
    </snip>

    The current hold is on master, not on release branches. I agree that
    merging further code changes on release branches (for example geo-rep
    issues that are backported (see [1]), as there are tests that fail
    regularly on master), may further destabilize the release branch. This
    patch is not one of those.


Two issues I have with the merge:
1. It just makes comparing master branch to release branch harder. For
example, to understand if there's a test that fails on master but
succeeds on release branch, or vice versa. 
2. It means we are not focused on stabilizing master branch.
Y.


    Merging patches on release branches are allowed by release owners only,
    and usual practice is keeping the backlog low (merging weekly) in these
    cases as per the dashboard [1].

    Allowing for the above 2 reasons this patch was found,
    - Not on master
    - Not stabilizing or destabilizing the release branch
    and hence was merged.

    If maintainers disagree I can revert the same.

    Shyam

    [1] Release 4.1 dashboard:

https://review.gluster.org/#/projects/glusterfs,dashboards/dashboard:4-1-dashboard