[cdwg] Summary of telecon on July 26, and review of information for the board

[Christopher J. Morrone]

Hi folks,

Here is a summary of the telecon from July 26 from my notes:

Attendees:

Chris Morrone - LLNL
Peter Jones - Intel
Cory Spitz - Cray
Justin Miller - IU
Mark Gary - LLNL
James Simmons - ORNL
John Hammond - TACC

My apologies if I missed anyone.

Some of the topics were:

- Maintenance releases

There was general agreement that we will all target our efforts towards 
making 2.4 the next maintenance branch.  See note for the board at the 
end of this email for more information.  Comments should be made by the 
end of Monday July 30th (lets say 4pm Pacific).

- Conversation about testing (and how we need more)

- Justin reported that the OpenSFS test cluster at IU is targeting 
August 1st to allow PAC contract testing to begin.  Rough specs are: 24 
compute nodes, 4 OSS nodes, 4 MDS nodes, IB connected, Westmere 
processors.  They are working on a wiki that will document the hardware. 
  * CDWG identified as likely group to schedule usage of the cluster.

- Need for unified roadmap discussed.  CDWG wants to take that on.  We 
need to make sure that our roadmap is well communicated to our community 
and to our board to avoid us advertising conflicting roadmaps.


And now my summary of the Lustre maintenance release plan as I 
understand it.  As I mentioned early, please let me know if you think 
I've gotten anything wrong as soon as possible.  I plan to relay this to 
the OpenSFS board by the end of the day on Monday.

Summary of Lustre Maintenance Release Plan
------------------------------------------

Lustre maintenance branches host the releases of lustre that we shall 
advertise to the general public as "stable" releases.  The goal of a 
maintenance branch is to include only bug fixes, to ensure a stable 
releases for a significant period of time.

We currently have a development cadence that puts out a "feature" 
release of Lustre every 6 months.  This is going reasonably well, and we 
plan to continue that process.  However, we do not have the resources to 
ensure that every six month release is entirely bug-free, nor do we have 
the resources to add a new branch every six months that will receive 
only bug, and be maintained for years.  We are not able to reasonably 
support and test that many branches in parallel at our current level of 
investment, nor would we wish to, as the testing requirements rise 
exponentially as the number of supported branches increases.

We have decided that every third feature release, occurring every 18 
months, will also be the beginning of a maintenance branch.  Tagged 
maintenance releases along the maintenance branch will occur on an 
as-needed basis, according to the demands of discovered bugs and their 
severity.  It is likely that tags will occur more frequently early in 
the branch's lifetime, and taper off in the later months and years.

We plan to make the initially advertised lifetime of a maintenance 
branch three years.

We agreed that Lustre 2.4 will begin the next maintenance branch, which 
has a targeted release date of the end of March, 2013.

There was some discussion among folks who intend to use 2.3 in 
production that it would be nice to have a "mini-maintenance" branch to 
hold them over until 2.4 is released.  Note that this branch would not 
be supported for a significant period of time, likely only a few month. 
  This will happen if there is sufficient demand and resources applied, 
but to avoid confusion among the broader community we will not be 
advertising this release.  We will also try to avoid using the term 
"maintenance" in association with 2.3 to avoid expectations of long term 
support if that branch becomes a reality.

Chris