Using This Repository

This repository is for tracking release requests for OpenStack projects. The releases are managed using groups of "deliverables", made up of individual project repositories sharing a Launchpad group and a version number history. Many deliverables will only have one constituent project.

The repository is managed by the Release Management team.

Defining a Deliverable

A "deliverable" is a unit of distribution of a useful project. It may be a single library or several server components that are packaged separately but released and used together. Rather than base the definition on technical terms such as packaging, we use the social organization of the project to identify deliverables. If the contents of two repositories share a bug reporting tool so that bugs for the contents of both repositories are mixed together and use the same version numbers for all releases (e.g., one launchpad project), they are both part of the same deliverable.

Within this repository, each deliverable is represented by a separate file within the release series directory or the _independent directory. The data that needs to go into each file is described in detail below. All automated manipulation of the deliverable is managed through the data file, which is reviewed by the core team when the patch is proposed to openstack/releases.

Requesting a Release

The PTL or release liaison for a project may request a release from master by submitting a patch to this repository, appending the necessary release metadata to the file describing the deliverable to be released. The release team will review the request and provide feedback about the version number.

The stable maintenance team, PTL, or release liaison for a project may request a release from a stable branch by submitting a patch to this repository, appending the necessary release metadata to the file describing the deliverable to be released. The release team will review the request and provide feedback about the version number. If the stable release is requested by the stable maintenance team, it should be acknowledged by the PTL or release liaison to ensure that the development team is aware of the coming change.

Prepare the release request by submitting a patch to this repository.

• Always add the new release to the end of the file being edited. The version numbers will be reordered for display.

• Always pick new version numbers for new releases. We do not update the contents of previously tagged releases, because that confuses users who have already downloaded those packages.

• Make sure you follow semantic versioning rules semver when picking the version number.

  In particular, if there is a change going into this release which requires a higher minimum version of a dependency, then the minor version should be incremented.

  Note

  The exception to this rule is when the versions of a project are pinned between minor versions in stable branches. In those cases we frequently release global-requirements syncs with a patch version to fix the target branch, e.g. stable/juno, but don't increment the minor version to avoid it being used in a different branch, like stable/kilo. Someone from the stable-maint-core team should +1 a change like this before it's approved.

• Do not increment version numbers artificially to maintain consistent versions between deliverables. We expect versions of compatible deliverables to drift apart over time, and made the decision to embrace this by using other tools to document for users which combinations of packages go together.

  http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-June/065992.html

  If two build artifacts always need to have the same version number, that implies strongly that they are part of the same deliverable and should not be released separately.

• Start version numbers with 0.1.0 for unstable early editions and prototypes. Switch to 1.0.0 for the first production-ready release. Do not release the first version of a deliverable with a number that matches the version other related deliverables use. This confuses consumers about the maturity of the new deliverable and about where they should find "older" versions with lower numbers, which do not exist.

• Set the first line (summary) of the commit message to the package name and version being requested.

• If you are not the release liaison or PTL, have the PTL of the project acknowledge the request with a +1.

• Do not use the "Depends-On" feature of zuul to make a release request depend on merging another patch in your project. The dependency management does not work properly in the release check jobs, and the validator requires that the patch listed in your deliverable file actually be merged into a proper branch.

• Do not submit multiple dependent patches for multiple releases. Having a patch series with multiple releases means the release team cannot properly prioritize processing them. During milestone weeks, preference is given to milestone releases. Releases from stable branches, independent projects, and other types of releases are processed later. If your milestone release request depends on a request that is deprioritized, you may miss the deadline.

• RC1 tags and stable branches should be submitted together for projects using the cycle-with-milestone release model.

Requesting a Branch

The PTL or release liaison for a project may request a new branch by submitting a patch to this repository, adding the necessary branch metadata to the file describing the deliverable to be released. The release team will review the request and provide feedback about the branch point and possibly the name.

Prepare the branch request by submitting a patch to this repository.

• RC1 tags and stable branches should be submitted together for projects using the cycle-with-milestone release model.

• Always add the new branch to the end of the list in the file being edited.

• Branches should use one of the standard prefixes:

  stable/ -- for stable series

  feature/ -- for temporary feature branches

  driverfixes/ -- for long-term driver maintenance, beyond the end of the stable branch

• stable/ and driverfixes/ branch names must match a valid series name.

• If you are not the release liaison or PTL, have the PTL of the project acknowledge the request with a +1.

• Do not use the "Depends-On" feature of zuul to make a branch request depend on merging another patch in your project. The dependency management does not work properly in the release check jobs, and the validator requires that the patch listed in your deliverable file actually be merged into a proper branch.

Reviewing a Release or Branch Request

Care needs to be taken when reviewing a request such that the version proposed (1) follows semver rules and (2) will not cause issues between branches, particularly stable branches (at least stable branches that are not yet using upper-constraints checking in CI runs, which is anything before stable/liberty).

General notes when reviewing a request:

• Check the version number for SemVer, especially for libraries.
• Make sure the summary of the patch includes the deliverable name and version number.

The following rules apply mostly to stable branches and therefore a member of the stable-maint-core team should +1 the following types of changes before they are approved.

• For libraries, check global-requirements.txt (g-r) in the openstack/requirements repo to make sure the version you are about to release does not cause a conflict and wedge the gate. Typically this is only a concern on stable branches with (un)capped dependencies.

  Typical examples of this kind of break (before upper-constraints are used):

  1. A stable branch, for example stable/juno, has uncapped dependencies on a library and a version is released on a newer branch, e.g. stable/kilo, and that version has updated requirements from global-requirements in stable/kilo which conflict with the versions of libraries allowed in stable/juno. This then leads to ContextualVersionConflict failures when installing packages on stable/juno.
  2. Similar to the point above, but if there are overlapping version ranges between two branches, like stable/juno and stable/kilo, you can have the same kinds of issues where a release from one branch which has g-r syncs specific to that branch gets used in the other branch and things break. We saw this happen with oslo.utils 1.4.1 which was intended for stable/juno consumption but because stable/kilo g-r allowed that version, we broke stable/kilo CI jobs since 1.4.1 had juno-level dependencies.

• The rule of thumb is that branches should not overlap versions at the minor version range. For example, stable/juno can require foo>=1.1,<1.2 and stable/kilo can require foo>=1.2,<1.3. In this way only patch-level versions are released for foo on stable/juno and stable/kilo. The pin at the minor version range prevents those patch-level versions from breaking each other's branch.

• Ensure that new branches are listed at the end of the branch list in the file.

Release Approval

Releases will only be denied during freeze weeks, periods where there are known gate issues, or when releasing will introduce unwanted instability. Releases made late in a week may be delayed until early in the next week unless there is a pressing need such as a gate failure or security issue.

Who is Responsible for the Release?

The release team is responsible for helping to clearly signal the nature of the changes in the release through good version number selection.

The project team is responsible for understanding the implications for consuming projects when a new release is made, and ensuring that releases do not break other projects. When breaks occur, the project team is responsible for taking the necessary corrective action.

Deliverable Files

Deliverable repositories for projects using cycle_with_intermediatry or cycle_with_milestones should be placed in their respective releases within the deliverables directory. Deliverable repositories for projects using the independent release model should be placed in the deliverables/_independent directory.

For deliverable set of projects, we use one YAML file per release series to hold all of the metadata for all releases and branches of that deliverable. For each deliverable, we need to track:

• the launchpad project name (such as oslo.config)

• the series (Kilo, Liberty, etc.)

• the release model being used

• for each repository

  • the name (such as openstack/oslo.config)
  • the hash of the commit to be tagged
  • the version number to use

• highlights for the release notes email (optional)

• the starting points of all branches

  We track this metadata for the history of all releases of the deliverable, so we can render a set of release history documentation.

  The file should be named based on the deliverable to be tagged, so releases for liberty from the openstack/oslo.config repository will have a file in openstack/releases called deliverables/liberty/oslo.config.yaml. Releases of the same deliverable from the stable/kilo branch will be described by deliverables/kilo/oslo.config.yaml.

Deliverables File Schema

The top level of a deliverable file is a mapping with keys:

team

The name of the team that owns the deliverable, as listed in the governance repository data files.

launchpad

The slug name of the launchpad project, suitable for use in URLs.

release-notes

The URL or URLs to the published release notes for the deliverable for the series.

Deliverables contained a single repository should simply include the URL to the notes for that repository. Deliverables made up of multiple repositories should use a hash to map each repository name to its notes URL.

include-pypi-link

Either yes or no, indicating whether the release announcement should include the link to the package on PyPI. Defaults to no.

release-model

Identify the release model used by the deliverable. See the reference section of the documentation for descriptions of the valid models.

type

Categorize the deliverable based on what it does. See the reference section of the documentation for descriptions of the valid deliverable types.

artifact-link-mode

Describe how to link to artifacts produced by the project. The default is `tarball. Valid values are:

tarball

Automatically generates links to version-specific files on tarballs.openstack.org.

none

Do not link to anything, just show the version number.

repository-settings

Mapping of special settings to control the behavior for each repository, keyed by the repository name.

flags

A list of flags attached to the repository.

no-artifact-build-job

This repository has no job for building an artifact, but should be tagged anyway.

retired

This repository is no longer used, but was present in old versions of a deliverable.

release-type

This (optional) key sets the level of validation for the versions numbers.

std

Default: Enforces 3 digit semver version numbers in releases and allows for common alpha, beta and dev releases. This should be appropriate for most OpenStack release requirements.

xstatic

Allows a more flexible versioning in line with xstatic package guidelines and requirements.

fuel

The Fuel project manages its own packages.

releases

A list of the releases for the deliverable.

branches

A list of the branches for the deliverable.

Each release entry is a mapping with keys:

version

The version tag for that release, to be applied to all of the member projects.

projects

A list of all of the projects making up the deliverable for that release.

highlights

An optional message to be included in the release note email announcing the release. (Use | to indicate a multi-line, pre-formatted message.)

Each project entry is a mapping with keys:

repo

The name of the repository on git.openstack.org.

hash

The SHA1 hash for the commit to receive the version tag.

tarball-base

An optional name for the base of the tarball created by the release. If no value is provided, it defaults to the repo base name.

Each branch entry is a mapping with keys:

name

The name of the branch.

location

The location value depends on the name.

If a branch name starts with stable/ then the location must be either an existing version tag or the most recently added version number under the releases list (allowing a tag and branch to be submitted together). All repositories associated with the version (as identified by the deliverable file) will be branched from that version using the name given.

If a branch name starts with feature/ then the location must be a mapping between the target repository name and the SHA of a commit already in the target repository.

If a branch name starts with driverfixes/ then the location must be a SHA of a commit already in the target repository on the associated stable branch.

Examples

For example, one version of deliverables/liberty/oslo.config.yaml might contain:

---
launchpad: oslo.config
branches:
  - name: feature/random-feature-work
    location:
      openstack/oslo.config: 02a86d2eefeda5144ea8c39657aed24b8b0c9a39
releases:
  - version: 1.12.0
    projects:
      - repo: openstack/oslo.config
        hash: 02a86d2eefeda5144ea8c39657aed24b8b0c9a39

and then for the subsequent release it would be updated to contain:

---
launchpad: oslo.config
branches:
  - name: feature/random-feature-work
    location:
      openstack/oslo.config: 02a86d2eefeda5144ea8c39657aed24b8b0c9a39
  - name: stable/newton
    location: 1.12.1
releases:
  - version: 1.12.0
    projects:
      - repo: openstack/oslo.config
        hash: 02a86d2eefeda5144ea8c39657aed24b8b0c9a39
  - version: 1.12.1
    projects:
      - repo: openstack/oslo.config
        hash: 0c9113f68285f7b55ca01f0bbb5ce6cddada5023
    highlights: |
       This release includes the change to stop importing
       from the 'oslo' namespace package.

For deliverables with multiple repositories, the list of projects would contain all of them. For example, the Neutron deliverable might be described by deliverables/mitaka/neutron.yaml containing:

---
launchpad: neutron
release-notes:
  openstack/neutron: http://docs.openstack.org/releasenotes/neutron/mitaka.html
  openstack/neutron-lbaas: http://docs.openstack.org/releasenotes/neutron-lbaas/mitaka.html
  openstack/neutron-fwaas: http://docs.openstack.org/releasenotes/neutron-fwaas/mitaka.html
  openstack/neutron-vpnaas: http://docs.openstack.org/releasenotes/neutron-vpnaas/mitaka.html
releases:
 - version: 8.0.0
   projects:
     - repo: openstack/neutron
       hash: 3213eb124e40b130e174ac3a91067e2b196788dd
     - repo: openstack/neutron-fwaas
       hash: ab5622891e2b1a7631f97471f55ffb9b5235e5ee
     - repo: openstack/neutron-lbaas
       hash: 19b18f05037dae4bbbada848aae6421da18ab490
     - repo: openstack/neutron-vpnaas
       hash: a1b12601a64a2359b2224fd4406c5db008484700

To allow tagging for repositories without build artifacts, set the no-artifact-build-job flag.

---
launchpad: astara
repository-settings:
  openstack/astara-appliance:
    flags:
      - no-artifact-build-job
releases:
  - version: 9.0.0.0b1
    projects:
      - repo: openstack/astara-appliance
        hash: c21a64ea7b3b0fbdab8592afecdd31d9b8e64a6a

Helpers

In order to help build out these files there are various command line based tools that come with this repository. To install these it is as easy as pip install . in this repository directory.

• list-changes that lists the changes in a given release file.
• interactive-release that goes through a wizard style set of questions to produce a new or updated release of a given project or set of projects.
• missing-releases scans deliverable files and verifies that all of the releases that should have been tagged by hand have been
• make-dashboard produces a CSV file that can be imported into Google docs (or any other spreadsheet) for tracking the milestone-based projects at the end of the cycle
• init-series initializes a new deliverable directory with stub files based on the previous release.

tools/aclmanager.py

A script to handle pre-release/post-release ACLs on stable/$SERIES branches.

The 'acls' action helps to produce a patch over openstack-infra/project-config that inserts a specific ACL for stable/$SERIES.

The 'groups' action helps to adjust the membership of $PROJ-release-branch Gerrit group, based on which stage the release branch is at. At pre-release we remove $PROJ-stable-maint, and add the $PROJ-release and Release Managers group (pre_release subaction). At post-release, we remove $PROJ-release and Release Managers, and add $PROJ-stable-maint (post_release subaction).

Examples:

To create the ACL patch for stable/newton:

tox -e aclmanager -- --series newton acls ~/branches/openstack-infra/project-config

To set the pre-release group membership:

tox -e aclmanager -- groups pre_release ttx

propose-final-releases

Command to edit the deliverable files in a releases repository to propose final releases. The command modifies files in an existing copy of the repository and does not invoke git at all, so you need to create a branch before running it then review the output, commit the changes, and push the patch to gerrit.

tox -e venv -- propose-final-releases newton ocata