How to find which Salt release will contain a fix you need

6 minute read Updated:

Salt branches

UPDATED ON 2019.10.23: SaltStack has adopted a new release strategy and this article is no longer relevant.

Salt is buggy. There are many threads (1, 2, 3, 4, …) about that. If you dig deep enough into any Salt feature, you are almost guaranteed to find bugs. This results in de-facto issue bankruptcy, plus it looks like Salt open source team is severely understaffed, and many talented folks recently left the company (Daniel Wallace, Nicole Thomas, Mike Place, Brett Benassi, Erik Johnson).

If you dig deep enough into any Salt feature, you are almost guaranteed to find bugs. How to deal with that?

Salt core tends to have fewer bugs than other modules contributed by the community. The main reason for that is the very liberal merging policy: right now there are ~2200 open issues, and just ~90 open pull requests. Salt team does code reviews and usually asks a submitter to add some test coverage, but obviously can’t test every feature against a real (and often highly specialized) system. So, because the original submitter may be no longer active, these bugs tend to stay open unless someone from the community steps in.

If you are lucky, your bug may be already fixed on GitHub. However, this doesn’t mean that the fix is already included in the latest stable release. Is there a way to find out if a particular PR got merged into a specific Salt release? Depending on the release ETA, you may decide either to invent a hacky workaround or just simply wait.

Alternatively, you may want to submit a fix yourself. However, it is not immediately clear on which branch you should base the fix. How the branches evolve? What is the difference between the version number (e.g., 2018.3.4) and codename (Oxygen)? Is there a mapping between them or a calendar that contains future release dates?

By closely watching the official GitHub repo, reading the documentation and hanging out in the Slack channel, I was able to collect and summarize various useful bits into this guide. I hope it helps.

When is an existing merged PR will be released?

There are several methods which you can use to find tags or branches that contain the PR you want.

1. ZRELEASED labels on GitHub

If a PR contains a yellow ZRELEASED - YYYY.MM.X label, then it is already released, and you need to upgrade your Salt version.

2. Git tags on Github

You can look for Git tags that contain the necessary commits:

Finding PR tags on GitHub

If there are no tags and the commit was merged into the develop branch, then you probably have to wait for the next major release. Bugfixes for older branches are eventually merged into newer ones. As for bugfixes in the develop branch, you can politely ask to backport them or do it yourself (see How to submit a PR).

3. Git branches or tags

Let’s say you want to find when the PR #46435 is going to be released. First, you need to clone the repo:

% git clone https://github.com/saltstack/salt
% cd salt

Then you need to find a commit that belongs to this PR. You can do this on GitHub (see the method 2 above), or using CLI:

% git log --grep '#46435'
commit d6263a0a4fcd2573afc5177831c20f003cbc74ce
Merge: f9c60ad6f7 b48255e101
Author: Nicole Thomas <nicole@saltstack.com>
Date:   Fri Mar 9 09:52:22 2018 -0500

    Merge pull request #46435 from onlyanegg/serializer_extmod

    Adding serializer extmod

The last step is to find which branches (or tags) contain the specific commit:

% git branch -a --contains d6263a0a4fcd2573afc5177831c20f003cbc74ce
* develop
  remotes/origin/2019.2
  remotes/origin/2019.2.0.rc1
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/develop
  remotes/origin/develop
  remotes/origin/hotfix/pytest
  remotes/origin/revert-50798-45839-develop
  remotes/origin/revert-51444-develop.py2

% git tag --contains d6263a0a4fcd2573afc5177831c20f003cbc74ce
v2018.11
v2019.2
v2019.2.0rc1
v2019.2.0rc2

From the output above we can infer that the feature will be released in version 2019.2.0, which is based on the 2019.2 feature branch (also known as Fluorine). The v2018.11 tag should be ignored because there are no branches with the same version (see the full git branch -a output).

4. Version-check tool

The process above could be simplified using the version_check tool and Docker. To install it clone the repo:

% git clone https://github.com/rallytime/version-check.git
% cd version-check/

And build the image:

% docker build -t version_check .

Finally, to use it run the following command (46435 is the PR number):

% docker run --rm -it version_check -p 46435
Branches:
  2019.2
  2019.2.0.rc1
  develop
  revert-50798-45839-develop
  revert-51444-develop.py2
Tags:
  v2018.11
  v2019.2
  v2019.2.0rc1
  v2019.2.0rc2

For usage details see the project’s README.

5. Salt-version-as-a-service

The highest layer of abstraction is available as the online tool http://versions.gtmanfred.com (internally it utilizes the above-mentioned version_check script). Unfortunately, it is no longer online. You could try to host it yourself or ping Daniel Wallace on Twitter and politely ask if he can bring it back to life.

How to submit a PR

Many times you’ll have to submit a fix yourself. Below is a simplified Salt branching model:

Salt branching model

The official documentation explains Salt branches in a more detailed fashion. To get more information on the release process, consult the Salt Git Policy and Salt Release Process pages.

Release schedule

Salt doesn’t currently have a scheduled release cadence. However, according to PyPI data, the expected time between releases is:

These are rough estimates, to stay in the loop you can subscribe to the salt-announce mailing list, or join the #releases channel on SaltStack Community Slack.

I haven’t found any reliable data that reflects the SaltStack feature planning process, but below are some clues you can use:

Just before a new release, you can see it being tagged on GitHub. After that it is typically a matter of days for packages to be built and uploaded. A release is usually happens in the first half of the week (70% of PyPI uploads happened in the first three days).

Next step

If you have some free time and want to improve Salt codebase, go to the issue tracker and help to fix a bug!

Also, you can follow me on Twitter where I periodically post things like this:

SaltTips tweet