openstack
/
contributor-guide
Code Issues Proposed changes

Add Extended Maintenance Info 

We had questions in the OpenStack Upstream
Institute content asking about the number or
releases that are maintained but did not have
anything in the guide that discussed that.

This patch adds content to support the questions.

Change-Id: I59466ddb45583e0df876cecb0d14455dd168bafd
Story: 2005404
Task: 30413
This commit is contained in:
Jay S. Bryant 2019-04-16 18:15:14 -05:00
parent 6d67fdf0ca
commit cef463a629
1 changed files with 55 additions and 0 deletions
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doc/source/common/releases.rst
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@ -73,3 +73,58 @@ milestone-3.
Having the main projects following the release cycle ensures that all these
projects release at the same time so these can be picked up by downstream
teams to package and further distribute.
Stable Branches
---------------
Once a 6-month development cycle is completed the code for that release
is branched, in git, to a stable branch. For instance, when the Stein
release was completed a new branch in git, ``stable/stein`` was created.
Stable branches are kept as a safe source of fixes for high impact
bugs and security issues which have been fixed, on master, since the
release occurred. Given the stable nature of these branches, backports
to stable branches undergo additional scrutiny when they are proposed.
Proposed changes should:
* Have a low risk of introducing a regression
* Have a user visible benefit
* Be self contained
* Be included in master and backported to all releases between master
and the stable branch in question
Project teams do point releases off stable branches when enough
changes accumulate in the stable branch to justify creating another release for
their project.
Stable branches proceed through different levels of maintenance as they
age.
+--------------+--------------------+--------------------------------------+
| State | Time frame | Summary |
+==============+====================+======================================+
| Maintained | Approximately 18 | All appropriate bug fixes accepted |
| | months | and releases are produced. |
+--------------+--------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Extended | While there are | All appropriate bug fixes accepted. |
| Maintenance | community members | No releases are produced and there |
| | maintaining it. | is reduced CI commitment. |
+--------------+--------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Unmaintained | 6 months from the | The branch is under Extended |
| | time the branch is | Maintenance rules, but there are no |
| | made unmaintained. | maintainers. |
+--------------+--------------------+--------------------------------------+
| End of Life | N/A | Branch is no longer accepting |
| (EOL) | | Changes. |
+--------------+--------------------+--------------------------------------+
Before the Ocata release the Maintained and Extended Maintenance phases were
only 6 months long. This meant that each release went End of Life after
18 months. It was determined that this practice was not beneficial for
distributors or users of OpenStack. As a result the Maintained state
was updated to last 18 months and the Extended Maitenance time frame
was made flexible increasing the number of stable branches still accepting
fixes.
The state of all OpenStack releases may be seen on the
`OpenStack Releases <https://releases.openstack.org>`_ web page.