Makes sense to me. At some point if we have some PMC member(s) volunteering to do maintenance on older releases, we shouldn't prohibit it. But I think setting a general expectation that we only do maintenance releases of the latest minor is pretty reasonable, especially given we've been pretty good about keeping our compatibility contracts clean.
-Todd On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 3:33 PM Adar Lieber-Dembo <[email protected]> wrote: > A recent Slack discussion revealed that we may not have consensus on > how our project handles backports to older branches. This e-mail is an > attempt to build that consensus; please weigh in if you have an > opinion. > > Perhaps it's best to start from first principles: when release x.y is > the latest released version of Kudu, and release x.y+1 is under > development, for which of all x.a (where a<y+1) releases do we expect > to see maintenance releases? In theory, any PMC member can kick off a > release of any version they choose. In practice, we've only done > maintenance releases for a handful of minors, and never more than one > maintenance release. So I think there's rough consensus that when > x.y+1 is under development, we're only supporting possible maintenance > releases for x.y. Put more simply, we should prepare for possible > maintenance releases only for the latest release of Kudu. > > Here's a strawman backport policy: only backport to branches where we > expect possible maintenance releases. Currently, 1.8.0 is the latest > minor release, so we should actively backport to branch-1.8.x until > 1.9.0 is released, at which point branch-1.9.x becomes the backport > target and branch-1.8.x is, for all intents and purposes, dead. > > What sorts of patches merit backporting? Off the top of my head: > - Fixes that keep CI working (e.g. pinning of unpinned Python > dependencies that break). > - Fixes to security vulnerabilities. > - Data loss fixes. > - Performance fixes, provided the impact:risk ratio is very high. > > What do you think? > -- Todd Lipcon Software Engineer, Cloudera
