Feature Freeze

Because Oslo does releases on a different schedule from many of the rest of the OpenStack projects, it is helpful to have some modified policies around feature freeze as well.

Problem Description

Oslo wants to respect the feature freeze date that is set for the OpenStack community as a whole, but due to the nature of libraries it can be problematic for us to continue adding new features right up until the official feature freeze.

Proposed Policy

Projects in the Oslo program will observe their own feature freeze, which will occur one week before the final non-client library release and continue until all of the consuming OpenStack projects have made their releases for the cycle. This is a hard freeze, and as such only critical bug fixes should merge during the freeze period.

Freezing early will provide time to release any pending changes in the Oslo libraries before the consuming projects enter feature freeze.

Exceptions

This policy will not apply to libraries that have not yet been released. Any in-progress work on those can continue through feature freeze as it will not affect any frozen projects.

Alternatives & History

We could simply observe the overall feature freeze date, but due to library release cycles that may result in new features being released during feature freeze.

Another option would be to not observe feature freeze at all and rely on our release-to-release compatibility requirements to handle any issues. This would not only make it more likely for us to release a buggy version of a lib during feature freeze, but it should be unnecessary as our consumers would be unable to implement any new features exposed in Oslo libraries during that time anyway.

Implementation

Author(s)

Primary author:

bnemec

Other contributors:

dhellmann

Milestones

One week before final non-client library release

Work Items

  • Make an announcement on the mailing list on the date of Oslo feature freeze

References

Revision History

Revisions

Release Name

Description

Kilo

Introduced

Rocky

Modified to better reflect current release landscape

Note

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode