[openstack-dev] Considerations when adding Nova config options

Thierry Carrez thierry at openstack.org
Tue Aug 14 07:59:09 UTC 2012


Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> We now have roughly 500 configuration options in Nova. That's absolutely
> insane. Especially if some of them are set by default to some known
> broken value and we don't have docs to tell users to change them.
> 
> I'd like us to start rationalizing configuration options - removing
> some, marking others as "experimental", adding more helpful guidance to
> the docs, etc. - but I'd really like if we could make a better effort to
> not make the problem worse in the meantime :-)

Agreed, we need to at least differentiate between the options that
almost everyone would want to change, and those that nobody in their
sane mind would ever consider to change.

Back in the day I started a wiki page (the remains of which can still be
seen at http://wiki.openstack.org/NovaConfigOptions?action=recall&rev=5)
that would not just list, but also categorize and prioritize the
available options... but I could not maintain it over the long run and
it was replaced by something more automatic.

Maybe we could add some category/priority/experimentalness declaration
where the option is defined, so that tools could pick it up and use it
to generate prettier documentation ? Sounds like the topic for a neat
Design Summit session.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Release Manager, OpenStack



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