The road to OpenStack Essex release candidates

Since the beginning of March, OpenStack developers are focusing on testing and bugfixes, with the objective of producing a release candidate for each project.

Regular readers of my blog know I'm not the last one to complain when I feel developers don't care about the release and don't participate to that critical sequence of the cycle. I'm happy to report that the engagement of developers around making Essex good is overwhelming. Driven by technical leads that understand the challenges, significant groups of old and new developers are participating, testing, assigning themselves to bugs reported by others and fixing them in record time. As project-focused groups, I think we are quickly maturing.

So, how far are we from Essex today ? The final release is set to April 5th, which means each core project needs to produce its final release candidate before then. As of today no project did produce a release candidate yet.

Swift is expected to release its final Essex version (1.4.8) on March 22. This version will be included in OpenStack Essex release, unless a critical regression is detected in it.

Keystone (which every other project depends on) is still struggling with 9 RC bugs, including some key decisions to be made on configuration handling. This is the hot spot right now: if you have free cycles, please consider asking Joe Heck (heckj on IRC) how you can best help the Keystone crew. I'd really like to have an RC1 for that project by Thursday next week.

Glance also looks still a bit far away, with 5 RC bugs listed and slow progress on them. I still hope Glance can be ready by Tuesday next week though.

Nova is looking quite good, with 2 RC bugs left on the list. The trick with Nova is that regressions and critical issues can hide in dark corners of its 120k lines of code, so the focus is really on finding the remaining issues, filing and targeting them. I expect we'll be able to publish RC1 on Monday or Tuesday next week.

Horizon is almost ready (3 RC bugs left), waiting for a few fixes to land in other projects before it can issue its RC1. It should be out early next week.

Once all projects release their RC1, the hunt for the overlooked release-critical issue will be on. It will be time to put the proposed release to the test. In order to limit potential last-minute regressions, only showstoppers will warrant a respin of the release candidate, other bugs will be listed in the Known Bugs section of the release notes. You can use the "essex-rc-potential" tag to mark bugs that you think should be fixed before we release Essex.

Let's all make it rock !