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

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth.xen@xxxxxxxxx>]

> On 3 Sep 2015, at 10:15, Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> 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.

I am happy with Wei making that decision. But we chatted on IRC yesterday, and 
my interpretation of that conversation was that because of B) which is really a 
policy decision and because A) was raised specifically as an objection to Wei's 
earlier RFC, it would make sense to at least highlight this issue.  

>> 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.

That's what I meant

> 
> Ian.


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