Open Stack

Greetings, [keystone]!

First, some history: Early in Keystone's life (before the integrated gate,
tempest, and human-readable API documentation), our API implementation
fluctuated on such a regular basis that it presented a severe stability
risk to OpenStack (particularly late in the integrated release cycle). To
address the situation on the Keystone side, we rapidly matured our
development process and became very wary of API changes. We document and
review proposed API impact before considering the implementation, guarantee
backwards-compatibility for every change we make, and avoid making *any*
core API changes during the last milestone of the integrated release (this
is the "milestone 2 deadline" referenced in the subject).

Since that time, we've raised the bar yet again for our development
process: openstack/keystone-specs. It's clear that changes impacting our
consumers are more well-thought-out and thoroughly documented than ever
before. We also have the integrated gate and and out-of-tree integration
tests to help catch API regressions. Now that our API documentation is
human-readable, we regularly get bug reports citing discrepancies between
our documentation, implementation and/or test suite.

We've made a lot of progress in the last few releases. With all that
additional process maturity, I think it's time we drop the milestone 2
deadline for API impacting changes. It's always been a stopgap in the
development process designed to catch issues like backwards incompatibility
and API unimplementium. Thankfully, we now have much better tools in place
to weed out those issues, and more importantly, have a superb core review
team capable of utilizing sound judgement on the acceptability of changes
to the core API.

With our milestone-2 deadline for Juno just around the corner, I've added
this topic to tomorrow's keystone meeting for discussion:

  https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/KeystoneMeeting

-Dolph
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