OK, so I think everyone has valid points and mostly I agree with Lukas, our issues are mainly the result of many quickly-iterating moving parts.  But we do have room to improve.  We need to remember that the reason we are running with all of these components is so that Hawkular master can be releasable both at any-time (stability) and at scheduled dates meeting certain feature goals (progress).   With that in mind it's quite important for the [component] developers to have a clear picture or what is needed from them for the next Hawkular feature release.  Given that knowledge the component should have a release available as far in advance as possible with the needed feature support.  As Lukas mentions, 2 weeks is a very good goal.  It could be that a Hawkular release doesn't even require a new component release.  Releasing daily/weekly/etc really doesn't make much difference, I think, instead it is important that there is a release early enough in the Hawkular release cycle that supports the next release of Hawkular.  This then sets us up to quickly respond with a follow-up release to address issues or things we missed.  The components must strive to be out in front of the console.

As for Mazz's suggestion of a dev/latest branch for each component.  I'm not convinced that that is necessary.  I think a component's master branch should be free to have commits towards their next release.  And note, they should be ready to release a new feature release at any time.  And that means no snapshot dependencies.   So, if your component is currently dependent on a snapshot of another component, you will obviously need to be working in an integration branch.  This is when Heiko's release-often approach is most critical.  If someone is depending on your snapshot I think your highest priority should then be to release to get them off of that dependency.  And consumers, help them do that as well.  This is the coin-flip exercise.

As for Versioning, we're getting closer to a standard but I think we could maybe do a little better.  My take on the recent discussions is this.  We know we can't release with snapshot dependencies so, as described above, we need to minimize the windows that a snapshot dep is in use by a consuming component.   We are all using  Major.Minor.Micro versioning. That is good.  And most of us are following the RH guideline of the suffix, like ".Final".  We are, I think, all using the following guidelines:

I would further suggest that all releases at this time use the ".Final" suffix.  Using ".AlphaX" does nothing more than create controversy.  It has no meaning wrt quality or usability at this point in time.   Anytime a feature or fix release goes out, the Major.Minor.Micro version change should be sufficient.  Release often [enough], increment the version and tack on ".Final".  No "Alpha", no "Snapshot", no timed "Snapshot".

I think we should take to heart Heiko's intentions and release often.  But I hope we can avoid fabricated release schedules for the components and instead have us focus on releasing based on the overall needs of Hawkular (2 weeks early!) and consuming components (kill snapshot deps ASAP!).


On 7/21/2015 2:03 PM, Lukas Krejci wrote:
git-flow?

On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 10:06:27 John Mazzitelli wrote:

Each repo needs to have a "dev/latest" branch. Should the component need
them, the pom.xml files in those dev/latest branches can refer to the
latest-n-greatest snapshot versions of components (we can have travis
publish the snapshot builds from these dev/latest branches). Therefore, if
you want the latest-n-greatest to test integration, switch to dev/latest
branches and build them locally.

If you want a released version that never changes go to the master branch
(which is the latest release) or go to one of the release tags and build
from that.

Once we are getting ready to prepare for a release, we create PRs to merge
dev/latest to master, changing the poms to the release versions that are
needed.

How long between merging dev/latest to master and release? I dunno. If we do
this right, we won't need a quick 1-week turnaround time. Every 2-weeks?
3-weeks? keep it a month? I don't know. Make something up. I vote every 17
days - only because its just as arbitrary as any other time period we might
pick :)

----- Original Message -----


Hello,

There are two issues that get interlaced here and should not be. One is to
release individual components on a schedule, and second is making sure
that
all the components integrate nicely. Your proposal with "at least one
release per week" is trying to fix a fix of a fix of previous decision.
And
in this mix, the two concepts of release and integration get so
interlocked
that we cannot make heads and tail.

Here is the progression of things:

Problem 1: monolithic code is bad, we need to componentize everything.
Solution: create single purpose repositories, which resulted in about 20
repositories.

Problem 2: how do we integrate all those components? Solution: create a
Hawkular repository that depends on all the other repositories.

Problem 3: integrated project idea works, but how do we really really
integrate the code? Solution: publish changes in subcomponents as soon as
possible.

Problem 4: publishing changes in components takes a long time, can we
expedite the process and get changes even faster to integrated project?
Solution: automate SNAPSHOT publication so you have freshly build binaries
on almost every change.

Problem 5: We need consistent builds for the integrated project. Solution:
master branch in the integrated project only depends on released version
of
components, feature branches are short lived.

Problem 6: It is almost impossible to align all the release of components
and give enough runaway for the integrated project to ingest all the
release subcomponets, especially since there inter-dependencies on the
sub-projects themselves. Solution: publish sub-components officially at
least once per week.

Problem 7: There are major changes that are needed right-away in the
integrated project. Solution: officially publish components more often
than
once per week. Publish as soon as the features makes it in. In fact, let's
publish Alphas (Alphaxx) with every single change.

Problem 8: Too many releases, it takes too much time to administer the
process of releasing. Solution: Automate the release dependency
management,
emulate the SNAPSHOT injection concept but with Alpha "moniker".

Problem 9: It is a nightmare to maintain on which version to depend on the
integrate project or components that depend on other components. Solution:
??

Problem 10: It is almost impossible to trace back the code that code that
goes into the integrated project because there are so many Alphas.
Solution: ???


We are at level 5; from 6 forward I see them coming, just as I saw the
rest
of 5. At what point do we stop and say "wait a second! what we doing here?
can we simplify all this??" From my perspective, we are arbitrarily
setting
requirements just to complicate things. There is always a happy medium and
there is always ways to simplify. I would much rather think for 2 months
on
how to simplify things and do it once, then stack problems that make our
lives harder for no reason.


That being said, I am not against implementing your proposed solution in
Hawkular Metrics. But I see two possible paths. One, escalate and resolve
problems 6, and 7 at the same time with automation. That is primarily
because we are so thin on resources and so stretched that we do not have
time to not automate this. Two, get a release engineer (or another
engineer) allocated to the team that will take care of these releases. If
we are to proceed with your current proposal please let us know which one
of these paths do you want Hawkular Metrics to take.


At the same time, we can take the reversed path; rather than escalate
problems, remove them from that stack. Why not look to simplify
everything,
revert a few problems and try to improve our productivity. We can revert
to
the use of SNAPSHOTS. In what capacity? Let's find the path that gives us
the most benefits with the least amount of work.


Thank you,
Stefan

----- Original Message -----


From: "Heiko W.Rupp" <hrupp@redhat.com>
To: "Discussions around Hawkular development"
<hawkular-dev@lists.jboss.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2015 4:38:58 AM
Subject: [Hawkular-dev] Release cadence

Hey

I have observed that our current Hawkular cadence of 4 weeks
with similar cadences of components makes us end up with
long living integration branches and a larger rush near the
end to integrate them, get them for the first time tested in CI
and even for the first time tested in real world.

In one of the last releases there was a changed implementation
in one component, that basically turned out as a no-op and
still returned a "200 OK" code, so clients thought everything is
happy, but it was not. We found the issue (through ppl looking
at the UI) and solved it, but it was in a rush.

This certainly goes against all the ideas of "release early, release
often", "cut small slices", "changes go into CI/CD and go live quickly".
Remember the coin flipping ?

Ideally we would always be able to integrate changes from
components into Hawkular (main), but I understand that with the
way maven and its release process to central works, it is also not
ideal to release many versions per day.

With all of the above in mind, I propose that we move to a
"at least once per week" model, where we do a component release
at least once per week(*), which then in the four week stream form
a new Alpha release. The smaller releases do not need release notes,
I don't care if we use the micro number or a .AlphaY designator on
them, but they should be a release, that is not a (named) snapshot.
This will allow us to still have less efforts to do releases, but
keep being (more) agile and have earlier integrations and thus
less long living integration branches.

On top of that, we need to provide new and/or changed apis(**)
early on in the 4 weeks cadence so that other components can
already start calling them, even if they are not yet functionally
complete.

*) Of course only if a change to the component has been made.
**) Ideally with changed apis, we keep the old version around for

  a bit and offer the new version on top. Remember, that especially
  with non-compiletime bindings, we can not know which client is
  at what api version.

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