[OpenAFS-devel] update on progress towards a 1.8 branch

[Benjamin Kaduk]

Hi everybody,

As you probably figured out from the flurry of gerrit activity in recent
months, we're looking to branch off a new stable branch (1.8.x) from
master.  This will let us produce a release with all the incremental
improvements that have accumulated on master over the years, before the
potentially destabilizing rxgk and related changes are merged to master.
Having 1.8 as a reference point will also make it easier to tell whether
any issues are fallout from the rxgk work or preexisting issues with
master.  (We hope there aren't any of those, but master hasn't been
getting enough testing to be particularly confident in that.)

"The 1.8 branch" has been a recurring item at the release-team meetings,
and we've been making progress on the outstanding release blockers.
Things like "build the libraries with libtool and make sure we don't
install libraries that depend on libraries we don't install" are already
merged, and I think that everything left to do is in gerrit in some form
or another.  That means that reviewing changes is directly helping the
release move forward!  A search string like "project:openafs status:open
branch:master NOT message:windows NOT CodeReview=-2 NOT CodeReview=+2
verified=1" is probably a good place to start -- there are a handful of
changes that are not verified (i.e., do not build) and are potentially
interesting, but there's not necessarily much point in reviewing things
which don't compile everywhere.  That example search string finds fewer
than 100 results (i.e., it can fit on one page), so the end is in sight!
Many of the -1 changes either have some other alternative change that
could be considered or are waiting for edits to be made.

As part of the preliminary work towards the 1.8 branch, I went through all
of the outstanding (non-windows) changes targetted for master and did
triage, marking as -2 changes which did not seem like candidates for
inclusion in 1.8, and the release team has been gradually going through
the remaining changes and fixing them up and getting things merged.
However, most of these discussions are really just technical issues that
are more appropriate on -devel than release-team; the release team was
only picking them up because they were blocking the 1.8 release.

So, I'll try to keep the technical discussions on -devel going forward,
and summarize some of the recent topics of discussion in separate
messages, to make the threading easier if discussion crops up on -devel.

-Ben