Re: [Xen-devel] [Vote] Re-open staging for contributions at RC3

[Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2015-09-02 at 17:12 +0100, Lars Kurth wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I wanted to kick off a vote related to the following threads
> * http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2015
> -08/msg00883.html - [URGENT RFC] Branching and reopening -unstable
> * http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2015
> -08/msg00543.html - [xen 4.6 retrospective] [urgent] rename "freeze" 
> window and make release branch as soon as possible after RC1
> 
> Although there was no consensus in the general case to say we should 
> always branch at RC-x at any given release, there seems to be enough 
> consensus for branching earlier, given a number of conditions are met:
> 
> In particular:
> 1: We should not re-open staging too early (aka we would need to get a 
> sense how much churn to expect)
> 2: Maybe we should not accept major re-factoring and leave it up to the 
> discretion of thy maintainers to do so - aka Ian Jackson's option B. But 
> there seems to be some disagreement around it. 
> 
> 2.1: Some maintainers are concerned that they would have to deal with 
> backporting, if we re-opened early.
> 
> 2.2: A sensible compromise seems to me for the maintainer to evaluate 
> whether a patch is ready to go in after RC3: if there is an amount of 
> back porting that the maintainer can't deal with, it is IMHO OK for the 
> maintainer to let the contributor know and give him/her the option to 
> provide a patch for two trees as it is customary in Linux OR to wait 
> until the ongoing release is out. This is a slight variant of Ian 
> Jackson's option B in http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen
> -devel/2015-08/msg00883.html ;
> 
> Of course, 1 will minimise the amount of incidents for 2
> 
> = VOTE =  
> With that in mind: please vote on
> A) Do we think 4.6 is in a good enough state to branch at the next RC 
> (which would be RC3)

IMHO this decision should be the Release Managers to make. I'm not sure how
to vote to express that, so I suppose I'll abstain.

Since I'm sure the RM would want input from maintainers to help them make
this decision I'll note that my opinion (not vote) is that the tree is
indeed in a good enough state to branch.

> B) Do we have enough consensus given that there is some disagreement on 
> how to deal with back-porting. In other words, does the proposal 2.2 
> above look sensible. 

It's not clear to me which branch "ready to go in after RC3" refers to, the
reopened staging or the newly branched 4.6 branch?

If the proposal is to ask maintainers to use their discretion when applying
things to staging, i.e. taking the possible need to do backports (of
subsequent patches) to the 4.6 branch and/or asking for help with backports
from the submitters of patches which need it then that gets +1 from me.

Ian.

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