Merge "Add feature freeze policy"

specs/policy/feature-freeze.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,99 @@
+================
+ Feature Freeze
+================
+
+Because Oslo does releases on a different schedule from many of the rest of
+the OpenStack projects, it is helpful to have some modified policies around
+feature freeze as well.
+
+Problem Description
+===================
+
+Oslo wants to respect the feature freeze date that is set for the OpenStack
+community as a whole, but due to the nature of libraries it can be
+problematic for us to continue adding new features right up until the official
+feature freeze.
+
+Proposed Policy
+===============
+
+Projects in the Oslo program will observe their own feature freeze, which will
+occur one week before the overall OpenStack feature freeze and continue until
+all of the consuming OpenStack projects have made their releases for the
+cycle.  This is a hard freeze, and as such only critical bug fixes should
+merge during the freeze period.
+
+Freezing early will provide time to release any pending changes in the Oslo
+libraries before the consuming projects enter feature freeze.
+
+Note that this policy also applies to oslo-incubator.  Feature freezing the
+incubator code means that if a bug in incubator is found by a consuming
+project, the sync of the fix to that project will not include any new
+features that may have been added to incubator in the meantime.
+
+Exceptions
+----------
+
+This policy will not apply to libraries that have not yet been released.
+Any in-progress graduation work on those can continue through feature
+freeze as it will not affect any frozen projects.
+
+Alternatives & History
+======================
+
+We could simply observe the overall feature freeze date, but due to library
+release cycles that may result in new features being released during feature
+freeze.
+
+Another option would be to not observe feature freeze at all and rely on our
+release-to-release compatibility requirements to handle any issues.  This
+would not only make it more likely for us to release a buggy version of a lib
+during feature freeze, but it should be unnecessary as our consumers would be
+unable to implement any new features exposed in Oslo libraries during that
+time anyway.
+
+Implementation
+==============
+
+Author(s)
+---------
+
+Primary author:
+  bnemec
+
+Other contributors:
+  dhellmann
+
+Milestones
+----------
+
+One week before OpenStack feature freeze
+
+Work Items
+----------
+
+* Make an announcement on the mailing list on the date of Oslo feature freeze
+
+References
+==========
+
+* http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/oslo/2015/oslo.2015-01-26-16.00.log.html#l-180
+* Library stable branches: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/155072/
+
+Revision History
+================
+
+.. list-table:: Revisions
+   :header-rows: 1
+
+   * - Release Name
+     - Description
+   * - 
+     - Introduced
+
+.. note::
+
+  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
+  Unported License.
+  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode
+