On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 1:58 PM, Doug Hellmann <d...@doughellmann.com> wrote: > Let's turn the question around: Why do you (or anyone) want to > package things that are not tagged as releasable by the contributors > creating them? What are those packages used for?
I know Ubuntu provides similar trunk repositories [1] but I'll reply to this specific bit from the RDO perspective. TL;DR: It's a lot of work to package OpenStack and we can't realistically ship quickly if we only start working once a stable release is done. Consumers (end users and deployment projects) of RDO packages have the same need - to keep up with trunk to do a stable release ASAP. The long version: RDO is first and foremost a community packaging effort of OpenStack for Red Hat based distributions. There are two main reasons why we keep up with trunk for packages throughout the whole cycle: #1 Consumers (i.e, end users, deployment projects) are also in their development cycles and want/need to keep up with trunk. We want to be able to provide RDO packages for these consumers to enable them to develop and test their tooling against the latest code from trunk. For example, the gate jobs for puppet module master branches run integration tests using the trunk repositories [2] while their stable branches use the stable repositories. There's a lot of changes that are introduced in a cycle, new features, deprecations, removal, non-backwards compatible, etc. Until these consumers install a package that contains one of these changes, they won't know how to use it, they won't know they're broken, etc. By continually providing up-to-date packages, they are able to test them right away and it allows them to spread the necessary work throughout the whole cycle, which brings me to the next point. #2 It's a lot of work and we want to release quickly. Seriously, just packaging and testing the packaging itself is a lot of work. New projects, new libraries, new dependencies, new configuration files, etc -- and we're not even installing them or configuring them. If we started packaging OpenStack only when the official stable release would be out, it would takes us several weeks/months to get stable packaging for RDO out. Mitaka is due in April and we're also on target to be releasing in April. Releasing the packaging for Mitaka months later is not something we want to do. This brings us back to the consumers who install and configure OpenStack with RDO packages, ex: - TripleO - Packstack - Kolla - Puppet-OpenStack If we ship RDO packaging months after a release, this means these projects can't develop and test against this release for months. This means their own release will also be delayed, almost bringing us to the next official release of OpenStack. At the risk of tooting my own horn a bit here, I went a bit more in depth into how RDO keeps up with trunk in a talk I've done recently [3] if you're interested. [1]: http://reqorts.qa.ubuntu.com/reports/ubuntu-server/cloud-archive/mitaka_versions.html [2]: https://github.com/openstack/puppet-openstack-integration/blob/b33ddbe34dacd4244cea5f6b8e674db5c8c939d3/manifests/repos.pp#L27 [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAWLm3jP7Mg&t=647 David Moreau Simard Senior Software Engineer | Openstack RDO dmsimard = [irc, github, twitter] __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev