On 13/12/17 11:17, Thierry Carrez wrote:
So... What do you think ?
Some points against that I haven't seen mentioned much yet:
* Following our standard deprecation policy, it would take up to 3 years
to remove anything. For perspective, 3 years ago we had just shipped
Juno. (I feel old now.)
* Other large, complex software distributions have moved to 6-month or
shorter development cycles (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, Chromium, Linux,
Firefox), with apparent success. What do we think is different about the
context in which we work that makes it a good idea to go in the other
direction?
* Upgrading OpenStack is painful for our users. Modern software
development theory holds that you make painful things less painful by
doing them *more* often, in smaller bites. (And preferably make the
developers suffer some of the pain, so they're motivated to reduce it.)
Less frequent upgrades with bigger changes is likely to provoke even
more of our users to remain on old releases indefinitely.
* It's true that OpenStack is mature in the sense that the things it
does are pretty stable. It's not true in the sense of it being close to
fulfilling our mission, of implementing a full-featured cloud. (e.g. my
pet bug-bear: applications can't use it unless they have economies of
scale, are prepared to implement a bunch of stuff themselves, and are
extremely motivated to use OpenStack over alternatives that are designed
with application support in mind... so basically just infra.) We
absolutely need to keep up a fast pace of innovation in order not to
become irrelevant.
* Natural complements to OpenStack like Kubernetes also have rapid
release cycles. If we're unable to respond rapidly to changes in them
(by adjusting our integration points in a timely fashion) then they're
going to be more inclined to put effort into working around OpenStack
than into working together. (The fact that said integration points
largely don't exist at the moment is also an example of the previous point.)
* As someone who will probably volunteer as a PTL again at some point,
the prospect of having to sign up for an entire year is a major
disincentive to do so.
I'm all for encouraging companies who are using OpenStack to contribute
e.g. 20% of a developer to helping out upstream. I'm not at all
convinced that regular releases are an obstacle to that - by the 'pace'
of development I suspect they mean the constant code churn resulting in
never-ending rebases of outstanding patches that they struggle to get
reviews on (often, it must be said, because they are GIANT), and not the
release cadence. So count me as -1 on this change.
cheers,
Zane.
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