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I couldn't find any solution for the backward incompatible
changes. As you mentioned this model will not work for LTS.
How about adopting this only for non LTS releases? We will not
have backward incompatibility problem since we need not release
minor updates to non LTS releases.
regards
Aravinda
On 05/05/2016 04:46 PM, Aravinda wrote:
regards
Aravinda
On 05/05/2016 03:54 PM, Kaushal M wrote:
On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 11:48 AM, Aravinda
<avishwan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,
Sharing an idea to manage multiple releases without
maintaining
multiple release branches and backports.
This idea is heavily inspired by the Rust release model(you
may feel
exactly same except the LTS part). I think Chrome/Firefox also
follows
the same model.
http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/10/30/Stability.html
Feature Flag:
--------------
Compile time variable to prevent compiling featurerelated code
when
disabled. (For example, ./configure--disable-geo-replication
or ./configure --disable-xml etc)
Plan
-----
- Nightly build with all the features enabled(./build
--nightly)
- All new patches will land in Master, if the patch belongs to
a
existing feature then it should be written behind that
feature flag.
- If a feature is still work in progress then it will be only
enabled in
nightly build and not enabled in beta or stable builds.
Once the maintainer thinks the feature is ready for testing
then that
feature will be enabled in beta build.
- Every 6 weeks, beta branch will be created by enabling all
the
features which maintainers thinks it is stable and previous
beta
branch will be promoted as stable.
All the previous beta features will be enabled in stable
unless it
is marked as unstable during beta testing.
- LTS builds are same as stable builds but without enabling
all the
features. If we decide last stable build will become LTS
release,
then the feature list from last stable build will be saved
as
`features-release-<NUM>.yaml`, For example:
features-release-3.9.yaml`
Same feature list will be used while building minor
releases for the
LTS. For example, `./build --stable --features
features-release-3.8.yaml`
- Three branches, nightly/master, testing/beta, stable
To summarize,
- One stable release once in 6 weeks
- One Beta release once in 6 weeks
- Nightly builds every day
- LTS release once in 6 months or 1 year, Minor releases once
in 6 weeks.
Advantageous:
-------------
1. No more backports required to different release
branches.(only
exceptional backports, discussed below)
2. Non feature Bugfix will never get missed in releases.
3. Release process can be automated.
4. Bugzilla process can be simplified.
Challenges:
------------
1. Enforcing Feature flag for every patch
2. Tests also should be behind feature flag
3. New release process
Backports, Bug Fixes and Features:
----------------------------------
- Release bug fix - Patch only to Master, which will be
available in
next beta/stable build.
- Urgent bug fix - Patch to Master and Backport to beta and
stable
branch, and early release stable and beta build.
- Beta bug fix - Patch to Master and Backport to Beta branch
if urgent.
- Security fix - Patch to Master, Beta and last stable branch
and build
all LTS releases.
- Features - Patch only to Master, which will be available in
stable/beta builds once feature becomes stable.
FAQs:
-----
- Can a feature development take more than one release cycle(6
weeks)?
Yes, the feature will be enabled only in nightly build and not
in
beta/stable builds. Once the feature is complete mark it as
stable so that it will be included in next beta build and
stable
build.
---
Do you like the idea? Let me know what you guys think.
This reduces the number of versions that we need to maintain,
which I like.
Having official test (beta) releases should help get features
out to
testers hand faster,
and get quicker feedback.
One thing that's still not quite clear to is the issue of
backwards
compatibility.
I'm still thinking it thorough and don't have a proper answer to
this yet.
Would a new release be backwards compatible with the previous
release?
Should we be maintaining compatibility with LTS releases with
the
latest release?
Each LTS release will have seperate list of features to be
enabled. If we make any breaking changes(which are not backward
compatible) then it will affect LTS releases as you mentioned. But
we should not break compatibility unless it is major version
change like 4.0. I have to workout how we can handle backward
incompatible changes.
With our current strategy, we at least
have a long term release branch,
so we get some guarantees of compatibility with releases on the
same branch.
As I understand the proposed approach, we'd be replacing a
stable
branch with the beta branch.
So we don't have a long-term release branch (apart from LTS).
Stable branch is common for LTS releases also. Builds will be
different using different list of features.
Below example shows stable release once in 6 weeks, and two LTS
releases in 6 months gap(3.8 and 3.12)
LTS 1 : 3.8 3.8.1 3.8.2 3.8.3 3.8.4 3.8.5...
LTS 2 : 3.12 3.12.1...
Stable: 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13...
A user would be upgrading from one branch
to another for every release.
Can we sketch out how compatibility would work in this case?
User will not upgrade from one branch to other branch, If user
interested in stable channel then upgrade once in 6 weeks. (Same
as minor update in current release style)
This approach work well for projects like Chromium and Firefox,
single
system apps
which generally don't need to be compatible with the previous
release.
I don't understand how the Rust project uses this (I am yet to
read
the linked blog post),
as it requires some sort of backwards compatibility. But it too
is a
single system app,
and doesn't have the compatibility problems we face.
Gluster is a distributed system, that can involve multiple
different
versions interacting with each other.
This is something we need to think about.
I need to think about compatibility, What new problems about the
compatibility with this approach compared to our existing release
plan?
We could work out some sort of a solution for this though.
It might be something very obvious I'm missing right now.
~kaushal
--
regards
Aravinda
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