project-team-guide/doc/source/stable-branches.rst

Stable Branches

The stable branches are intended to be a safe source of fixes for high impact bugs and security issues which have been fixed on master since a given release.

Stable branches are cut from the last release of a given deliverable, at the end of the common 6-month development cycle.

Support phases

Stability is always a trade-off between "bug-free" and "slow-moving". In order to reach that stability, we define several support phases:

• Phase I (first 6 months): All bugfixes (which meet the criteria described below) are appropriate
• Phase II (6-12 months): Only critical bugfixes and security patches are acceptable
• Phase III (more than 12 months): Only security patches are acceptable

Note

It's nevertheless allowed to backport fixes for other bugs if their safety can be easily proved. For example, documentation fixes, debug log message typo corrections, test only changes, patches that enhance test coverage, configuration file content fixes can apply to all supported branches. For those types of backports, stable maintainers will decide on case by case basis.

Given that stable branches are created every 6 months, that means that at any given time, only one branch is in Phase I support and only one branch is in Phase II support. Depending on how long each branch is supported, there may be one or more releases in Phase III support.

The exact length of any given stable branch life support is discussed amongst stable branch maintainers and QA/infrastructure teams at every Design Summit. It is generally between 9 and 15 months, at which point the value of the stable branch is clearly outweighed by the cost in maintaining it in our continuous integration systems.

Appropriate Fixes

Only a limited class of changes are appropriate for inclusion on the stable branch. A number of factors must be weighed when considering a change:

• The risk of regression: even the tiniest changes carry some risk of breaking something and we really want to avoid regressions on the stable branch
• The user visible benefit: are we fixing something that users might actually notice and, if so, how important is it?
• How self-contained the fix is: if it fixes a significant issue but also refactors a lot of code, it's probably worth thinking about what a less risky fix might look like
• Whether the fix is already on master and all consequent stable branches: a change must be a backport of a change already merged onto master, unless the change simply does not make sense on master. Same applies to N-2 releases, where N is master, in which case both N-1 and N branches should have the patch merged.

Note

Some patches may get exception from this last rule. These are patches that do not touch production code, like test-only patches, or tox.ini changes that fix major gate breakage, etc.; or security patches that should not take much time to merge once the patches are published. In those cases, stable patches may be pushed into gate without waiting for all consequent branches to be fixed.

Anyone can propose stable branch backports. See Proposing Fixes for more information on how to do that.

Stable maintenance teams

Each project team should designate a stable branch cross-project liaison as the main point of contact for all stable branch support issues in the team. If nobody is specifically designated, the PTL will be assumed to cover that duty.

Project-specific teams

Each project with a stable branch will have a project-specific stable maintenance team, which will be in charge of reviewing backports for a given project, following the stable branch policy. Originally that group should be the project Stable Branch Cross-Project Liaison + the stable maintenance core team. Those groups are managed by the stable maintenance core team, names are added after the suggestion of the Stable Branch cross-project liaison.

Stable Maintenance Core team

The stable maintenance core team is responsible for the definition and enforcement of the Stable Branch policy. It will be granting exceptions for all questionable backports raised by project-specific stable maintenance groups, providing backports reviews help everywhere, maintaining the stable branch policy (and make sure its rules are respected), educating proposed project-specific team members on those rules and adding them to those project-specific teams.

Active Maintenance

Project-specific teams are expected to be actively maintaining their stable branches which generally includes:

1. Following the Review guidelines. Specifically, not allowing backports of new features, new dependencies, or backward incompatible changes.

   • Hint: if a project version has a cap in stable branch global-requirements in stable/liberty or later, it means there was a backward incompatible change which broke that stable branch. This generally applies to libraries and client projects.

2. Proactively identifying and backporting significant bug fixes from master to stable branches. This means the team is trying to get high impact bugs fixed on stable before anyone hits them and has to report a bug or propose a backport after the fact (after they already hit the issue in their production cloud). There is no rule about how often or how many bugs found and fixed in master should be backported to stable branches. The main idea is to get regressions and other high-impact issues resolved on all appropriate branches quickly.

3. Monitoring the backlog of open backport reviews and actually reviewing them in a timely manner.

4. Releasing frequently enough to get fixes out without overwhelming the release team or consumers. In general, security fixes and other critical bug fixes should be released quickly. Otherwise when there are a reasonable amount of unreleased fixes committed, teams should be looking at doing a release. Milestone boundaries during the master release schedule are also good times to be inspecting the list of unreleased changes to see if a stable point release should happen.

5. Monitoring and resolving issues in the continuous integration 'gate' system. This basically means making sure there aren't things blocking proposed backports from passing tests. These could be project-specific or global in nature and are usually tracked in the stable tracker etherpad. From time to time the Stable Maintenance Core team may also ask for help from individual projects in IRC or the openstack-dev mailing list and expect a reasonably prompt response.

   Note

   Projects with the stable:follows-policy tag should be running the periodic-<release> jobs as defined in the openstack-infra/project-config repo. Here is an example of running periodic-kilo and periodic-liberty jobs on Designate.

6. Stable branch cross-project liaisons should be available in the #openstack-stable channel on freenode IRC to answer questions or be made aware of issues.

Review guidelines

Each project stable review team need to balance the risk of any given patch with the value that it will provide to users of the stable branch. A large, risky patch for a major data corruption issue might make sense. As might a trivial fix for a fairly obscure error handling case.

Some types of changes are completely forbidden:

• New features
• Changes to the external HTTP APIs
• Changes to Nova's internal AMQP API
• Changes to the notification definitions
• DB schema changes
• Incompatible config file changes

Proposed backports breaking any of the above guidelines can be discussed as exception requests on the openstack-dev list (prefix with [stable]) where the stable maintenance core team will have the final say.

Each backported commit proposed to Gerrit should be reviewed and +2ed by two project-specific stable maintenance team members before it is approved. Where a team member has backported a fix, a single other +2 is sufficient for approval.

If unsure about the technical details of a given fix, project-specific stable maintenance team members should consult with the appropriate project core reviewers for a more detailed technical review.

If unsure if a fix is appropriate for the stable branch, project-specific stable maintenance team members should seek stable maintenance core team members opinion.

Existing core developers are greatly encouraged to join the stable maintenance teams in order to help with reviewing backports, judging their appropriateness for the stable branch and approving them.

Fixes for embargoed security issues receive special treatment. See the chapter on vulnerability management for more information.

Processes

OpenStack development typically has 3 branches active at any point of time, master (the current development release), stable (the most recent release) and oldstable (previous release). There can from time to time exist older branches but a discussion around that is beyond the scope of this guide.

In order to accept a change into $release it must first be accepted into all releases back to master.

• A change for stable must exist in master
• A change for oldstable must exist in stable and master

For the sake of discussion assume a hypothetical development milestones:

• The current development branch (master) will be the Uniform release.
• The current stable branch (stable/tango) was Tango and is now in Phase I support.
• The current oldstable branch stable/sierra was Sierra and is now in Phase II support.

Proposing Fixes

Anyone can propose a cherry-pick to the stable-maint team.

One way is that if a bug in launchpad looks like a good candidate for backporting - e.g. if it's a significant bug with the previous release - then just nominating the bug for a stable series (either stable or oldstable) will bring it to the attention of the maintainers e.g. Nova Kilo nominations

If you don't have the appropriate permissions to nominate the bug, then tagging it with e.g. $release-backport-potential is also sufficient e.g. Nova Liberty potential

The best way to get the patch merged in a timely manner is to send it backported by yourself. To do so, you may try to use the "Cherry Pick To" button in the Gerrit UI for the original patch in master. Gerrit will take care of creating a new review, modifying the commit message to include 'cherry-picked from ...' line etc.

Note

The backport must match the master commit, unless there is a serious need to differ e.g gate failure, test framework changed in master, code refactoring or some other reason. If you get a suggestion to enhance your backport in some way that would be contrary to this intent, the reviewer should be referred to the warning above <stable-modifications>.

Note

For code that touches code from oslo-incubator, special backporting rules apply. More details in Oslo policies

If the patch you're proposing will not cherry-pick cleanly, you can help by resolving the conflicts yourself and proposing the resulting patch. Please keep Conflicts lines in the commit message to help reviewers! You can use git-review to propose a change to the hypothetical stable branch with:

$ git checkout -t origin/stable/tango
$ git cherry-pick -x $master_commit_id
$ git review stable/tango

Note

cherry-pick -x option includes 'cherry-picked from ...' line in the commit message which is required to avoid Gerrit bug

Failing all that, just ping one of the team and mention that you think the bug/commit is a good candidate.

Change-Ids

When cherry-picking a commit, keep the original Change-Id and gerrit will show a separate review for the stable branch while still allowing you to use the Change-Id to see all the reviews associated with it. See this change as an example.

Warning

Change-Id line must be in the last paragraph. Conflicts in the backport add a new paragraph, creating a new Change-Id but you can avoid that by moving conflicts above the paragraph with Change-Id line or removing empty lines to make a single paragraph.

Email Notifications

If you want to be notified of new stable patches you can create a watch on the gerrit watched projects screen with the following settings.

Project Name: All-Projects
     Only If: branch:stable/liberty

Then check the "Email Notifications - New Changes" checkbox. That will cause gerrit to send an email whenever a matching change is proposed, and better yet, the change shows up in your 'watched changes' list in gerrit.

See the docs for gerrit notify configuration and the gerrit search syntax.

Bug Tags

Bugs tagged with $release-backport-potential are bugs which apply to a stable release and may be suitable for backporting once fixed. Once the backport has been proposed, the tag should be removed.

Gerrit tags bugs with in-stable-$release when they are merged into the stable branch. The release manager later removes the tag when the bug is targeted to the appropriate series.

Gate Status

Keeping the stable branches in good health in an ongoing effort. To see what bugs are currently causing gate failures and preventing code from merging into stable branches, please see the stable tracker etherpad, where we will track current bugs and in-flight fixes.

Scheduled test runs occur daily for each project's stable branch. If failures crop up, the bot will email the openstack-stable-maint mailing list. It is best to react quickly to these and get them resolved ASAP to prevent them from piling up. Please subscribe if you're interested in helping out.

Proactive backports

To make sure suitable bug fixes that land in master branches are delivered to stable branch consumers in timely manner, and to avoid situations when a high impact bug fix falls through the cracks and does not get quickly provisioned to users, projects may adopt a 'proactive' approach towards tracking patches that are candidates for backports, as described below.

Note

The first project that adopted the described approach is Neutron. Other projects are welcome to experiment with similar practices and provide feedback and improvements.

Note

Tools mentioned in the guidelines below are currently maintained in openstack-infra/release-tools repository. Most of them are implemented as Unix filters that can be interconnected into a pipeline to accommodate for specific project needs and practices.

Note

Guidelines below assume that there is a group of people behind the effort that are willing to help. Tips on how to build the subteam are out of scope for the document.

From high level perspective, proactive backporting process consists of the following steps:

1. identify bugs fixed since the previous triage event;
2. of those, pick only those bugs that does not break stable policy policies;
3. distribute identified backport candidates among subteam members;
4. subteam members consider each candidate bug for inclusion into stable and oldstable branches; if applicable, backports are proposed for review and tracked until inclusion into appropriate branches;
5. new stable releases are created in due time.

Note

Most of those steps require human intervension (with the prominent exception of the first step) because triaging requires specific judgement. New release proposals can be automated, but at the moment, this is left out of scope for this document.

This is ongoing process, and it's usually executed on weekly basis, or with other frequency that fits better the subteam and the project in question.

Now, let's cover each step with more details.

Identify new bug fixes

The process assumes that the subteam keeps track of the last git hash that was validated somewhere. For the initial candidate list generation, it's advised to start on a branch boundary (the latest common git commit between stable and master branches).

For every new git commit found in master branch, commit message is checked for bug tags (Closes-Bug, Partial-Bug, Related-Bug, ...) All bugs mentioned are considered for initial filtering.

For this exact need, use the following release tool:

$ ./bugs-fixed-since.py --repo ../neutron --start 1ce8ce9546479c0ce6055c0c205a8885699e3051
1514424
1560464
1546110
...

Filter out features and enhancements

Due to stable policy described above, new features and enhancements are generally not allowed in stable branches. For example, to filter out bugs that have importance set to Wishlist in Launchpad, you can use the following tool:

$ ./bugs-fixed-since.py [...] | lp-filter-bugs-by-importance.py neutron --importance Wishlist
1514424
1560464
1546110
...

The resulting list is expected to contain only actual bug fixes.

In case you also want to filter out bugs of Low importance, append another call to the tool:

$ [...] | lp-filter-bugs-by-importance.py neutron --importance Low
1514424
1560464
1546110
...

Once you are satisfied with the query result, you should remember the latest commit checked, and also store the bug list somewhere.

To achieve the latter, multiple directions can be taken.

1. One way is to store it in some external tool like Etherpad. If this direction is chosen, the following tool may become handy to make the list more consumable:

$ [...] | ./annotate-lp-bugs.py neutron
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1514424 "neutron metadata ns proxy does not support ssl" (Medium,Fix Released) [in-stable-mitaka,l3-ipam-dhcp] [vuntz]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1560464 "ovsdb monitor doesn't return ofport" (High,Fix Released) [in-stable-liberty,in-stable-mitaka] [kevinbenton]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1546110 "DB error causes router rescheduling loop to fail" (Medium,Fix Released) [in-stable-kilo,in-stable-liberty,in-stable-mitaka,l3-ipam-dhcp,liberty-backport-potential] [brian-haley]
...

1. Another alternative is to tag backport candidates in Launchpad. For that, it's advised to avoid using $release-backport-potential tags, and instead introduce a new tag per project team (f.e. neutron-proactive-backport-potential for Neutron). This is to avoid conflicts in the tag usage by multiple teams running independent backporting processes when bug fixes spanning multiple projects are considered.

$ [...] | ./lp-tag.py neutron-proactive-backport-potential

This command will tag all identified backport candidates with the project specific tag. For example, check the neutron proactive-backport-potential dashboard.

With that, you get access to all filtering features available in Launchpad.

Distribute the work

Once you have a list of candidate bug fixes to consider for backporting, it's time to distribute it among subteam members. Depending on which method is chosen above to track candidate bug fixes, you may utilize Launchpad search queries, or other filtering technique to identify bugs of specific topics of interest, to distribute the work to folks who are experts in those topics.

Note

Exact search queries and filters are project specific and largely depend on existing bug tracking practices adopted by projects. Hence they are out of scope for the document.

Candidate triage

Each candidate bug should be assessed on its applicability to stable and oldstable branches, as per corresponding support phase definitions. For example, for stable branch, all bug fixes of user value can be considered to backport; while for oldstable branch, only critical bugs are allowed to be backported.

For every applicable stable branch, a backport is proposed in Gerrit. The backporter is expected to follow the progress of the backport to make sure it's not lost in reviews.

Once all applicable backports are proposed to Gerrit and are on their path towards stable inclusion, <project>-proactive-backport-potential tag can be removed from the bug.

Note

If possible, consider keeping the order of backports in a way that would reduce the number of git conflicts.

Release often

Proactive backporting process is expected to trigger higher volume of changes in stable branches. To make releases more granular, it's advised participating projects create new stable releases often. It may be done on a bi-weekly basis, or any other schedule that fits better the project and its actual backports volume.