Open Stack

Hi,

The TC has recently been considering what the big tent means for
Stackforge.  In short, very little will be changing, except that we will
now start putting projects previously destined for stackforge/ in the
openstack/ git namespace.

The big tent is a recognition that there are a lot of projects in our
community that contribute to the OpenStack mission statement.  After we
simplified the procedure for joining OpenStack as an official project,
we have seen a large number of projects from Stackforge join, and
therefore, we have spent a good deal of time moving the git repositories
for those projects from stackforge/ to openstack/.

While we often say "move", that's really a misnomer.  It's easy to "mv"
one directory to another on a filesystem, but "moving" a hosted git
repository is not so easy.  For all intents it is actually a rename of
the project.  Even though the last part of the URL is the same, the
middle part is not, which means that every user or developer must deal
with that in some way.  In some cases, automated redirects may alleviate
the immediate pain, but that doesn't work in all cases, and eventually
documentation, configurations, and scripts must be updated or risk
becoming confusing or out of date.  In short, it's very disruptive for
each project that undertakes this renaming process.  It is also a
significant burden on the Infrastructure team which has to do quite a
bit of work to move each and every repository, and do so during a
maintenance window as many of our tools were not designed to cope with
renaming projects on-line.

After quite a bit of discussion, the TC decided that it didn't want to
change anything about the Stackforge program at all, except to remove
this speed-bump for projects joining OpenStack officially.  Any project
related to OpenStack that wants to be a part of our community and use
our project infrastructure, whether ultimately destined to be an
official OpenStack project or not, is welcome just as before.  The
difference is that now, instead of creating the project as
"stackforge/foo" we will create it as "openstack/foo".  That doesn't
mean the project is an official OpenStack project -- that is decided by
the TC, and the list of official projects is maintained here:

  http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/governance/tree/reference/projects.yaml

and published here:

  http://governance.openstack.org/reference/projects/index.html

This may be disconcerting to those of us who are used to reading
"openstack/foo" and thinking that is the badge of office for an
OpenStack project.  That is a convenient shortcut, but in the long run,
encoding part of the software development life-cycle of a project in
something so unrelated and difficult to change as the name of the git
repository is unnecessary and burdensome for everyone.

With this change, "openstack/" will contain the projects that are
produced by the OpenStack community at large.

-Jim