Open Stack

Davanum:

I don't think the problem is necessarily the existing mechanism for
reporting bugs or feature requests (I do think that ops aren't reporting
usability issues as bugs, even though they should, but put that aside for a
moment).

My worry is about the disconnect between how developers believe operators
use OpenStack, and how operators actually use OpenStack, and the problems
caused by that disconnect. What initially prompted this was the assumption
that devs could introduce a new feature that was disabled by default, and
then after a couple of releases they could enable it by default, the
assumption being that operators would have tested this experimental feature
in the initial releases. But operators don't test against features like
that, so this was an incorrect assumption: introducing a new feature that
is disabled by default doesn't necessarily lead to operators testing it.

Another example is how operators write scripts that do things like poke
directly at the database in order to work around missing features in the
tools. Here is a case that they should be reporting usability issues. But
they don't. And so these scripts use the equivalent of an undocumented,
internal interface that could break in a future release. I worry that the
ops are not communicating back to the devs when they have to poke at
internals to workaround problems. And, honestly, I don't have a good
suggestion here (unless we could "embed" some OpenStack devs into
environments with production deployments and have them watch what happens,
which would be great, but probably not a viable solution).

Lorin

On Sat, 16 Mar 2013 at 10:45PM,  Davanum Srinivas <davanum at gmail.com> wrote:

> Lorin,
>
> Dumb question - are the existing mechanisms to raise feature requests
> lacking? (Can devs assume that ops folks will open a new bug in
> launchpad?)
>
> -- dims
>
> On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 10:38 PM, Lorin Hochstein
> <lorin at nimbisservices.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 9:13 PM, Michael Still <mikal at stillhq.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 8:50 PM, Blair Bethwaite
> >> <blair.bethwaite at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> I think my overall learning from this thread is that there's no point
> >> disabling features for a few releases so that operators can test in a
> >> staged manner -- the reality is that testing doesn't occur.
> >
> >
> >
> > Here's a broader question: what are the other implicit assumptions that
> devs
> > are making about how ops...er...operate? How can the OpenStack project
> take
> > the experiences of operators and feed that back to the developers so they
> > know what people are really doing in practice?
> >
> > For example: do the devs know the circumstances for which operators have
> to
> > poke directly at the database to perform tasks because they can't do what
> > they want with the existing tools?
> >
> >  Lorin
>
>
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