Hi all, for better or worse, the Hadoop community works in multiple branches. We have to do sustaining work on 0.20, even while we hope that 0.23 will finally replace it. Even after that happens, we will then need to do sustaining releases on 0.23 while future development goes into 0.24 or 0.25, and so on.
This is the price we pay for having this stuff actually in use in production. That's a good thing! And it's been that way in every software company I've worked in. My current efforts as release manager for 0.20.205 have made a couple deficiencies in our Jira infrastructure painfully obvious. So I would like to propose two changes that will make it way easier and more reliable to handle patches for sustaining bug fixes. But I wanted to bounce them off you and make sure they have community support before asking the Infrastructure team to look at them. 1. Add a custom field "Target Version/s" [list]. Motivation: When making a release, one wants to query all Jiras marked fixed in this release. This can't be done reliably with current usage. Also, one wants to be able to query all open issues targeted for a given branch. This can't be done reliably either. Why current usage is deficient: Currently we have "Affects Version/s" and "Fix Version/s". But the Fix Versions is being overloaded. It is used to mean "should be fixed in" (target versions) while the bug is open, and "is fixed in" (fix versions) after the bug is resolved. That's fine if there's only one branch in use. But if a fix is targeted for both A and B, and it's actually committed to A but not yet to B, there's no way to query the state of the fix. The bug appears open for both (or sometimes it's incorrectly closed for both!). You have to manually visit the individual bug report and review the SubversionCommits. This might be automatable, but it sure isn't easily expressed. If we add a Target Versions field, then intent and completion can be separately marked (in the Target Versions and Fix Versions, respectively), and simple queries can clearly differentiate the cases. 2. Add "target branch/s" field to Attachments metadata (or if that's not feasible, establish naming convention for Attachments to include this info) Motivation: Enable CI test-patch on patches targeted for non-trunk, as well as make the target clear to human viewers. If this field can be added (I'm not sure Jira supports it), I suggest adding it to the "Attach Files" dialogue box, and displaying it in the Attachments and Manage Attachments views. If the Infra team says Jira can't support it, then we (Hadoop dev) should talk about an unambiguous naming convention. If this meta-datum were available, it should be fairly easy to modify the automated test-patch process to test each patch against its intended target branch. (This process is managed internally by members of the Hadoop dev team, and I can help with it.) This would give the usual benefits of CI to our sustaining processes as well as mainstream development. If you like either or both of these ideas, kindly +1 them. If it's a bad idea, by all means say why. Absent negative feedback, I'm planning to open Infrastructure requests in a few days.
