(In)Stability of the Quarterly Branch
Vlad K.
vlad-fbsd at acheronmedia.com
Wed Nov 16 12:17:17 UTC 2016
The quarterly branch (Q) is intended to provide a set of "stable"
packages that in the lifetime of such a branch, receive only bug and
security fixes. That is the theory and intent behind the branch. In
practice, however:
1. The Q branch is cut off at predetermined dates (ie. not when it's
stable and ready), and it is cut off from HEAD, thus including the state
of ports at that moment. This breaks the promise of stability and
guarantees that every 3 months there will be uncertainty as to whether
the fresh new versions are working or not. There is no such thing as a
"Pre-Quarterly repo" which would receive all updates for the NEXT Q
branch-off, and which would freeze and stabilize for some time before
branch-off. And even if it did, 3 months would be too short.
It is effectively not much different from tracking HEAD and doing
updates only every three months, with the added benefit that SOME
security updates will come down sooner. But:
2. Unfortunately not all "security or bug-only fixes" are MFH'd, and as
a bugzilla triager I've had the opportunity to observe this in practice.
It can be as simple as accepting a minor upstream version bump, or as
complex as requiring cherry-picking and backporting code if upstream
mixes security, bug fixes with new features. It is none-the-less a
manual work requiring ports-secteam to review and accept the patches. It
is not clear who is supposed to do cherry-picked backporting if the
patches to HEAD cannot be MFH'd as they are. It is also additional
burden to the ports-secTEAM which at the moment is, effectively, one
person.
As it is obvious that the promise of a stable repo in its current form
requires manpower and manual work which we do not have, my proposal is
to abandon the promise of "security/bugfix" only changes and adopt the
approach not unlike Gentoo's, in which a "STABLE" repository receives
ALL the updates from HEAD, but only after certain criteria has been met,
like minimal age of changes, no open issues, a certain battery of
regression/integration/unit tests is performed, etc...
The key, I believe, is in automation which we can achieve with this, and
with that offer at least SOME level of stability without broken
promises. The key to this automation is no manual review, which can only
be achieved if we accept ALL changes, but stabilized to certain degree.
The idea of a "stable" repository is a valiant one, we definitely need
it if we want to increase the usage of FreeBSD in production as more
than just a base OS that does routing and ZFS storage -- namely
production use of stable ports. And IMHO we only need to balance between
how stable we can provide/guarantee it and what resources and manpower
we have available to do so.
What are the community's thoughts on this?
--
Vlad K.
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