[openstack-dev] [Nova] The unbearable lightness of specs

John Garbutt john at johngarbutt.com
Fri Jun 26 11:20:23 UTC 2015


On 26 June 2015 at 11:19, Nikola Đipanov <ndipanov at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 06/25/2015 09:46 PM, Joe Gordon wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 1:39 AM, Nikola Đipanov <ndipanov at redhat.com
>>
>>
>>
>>     > As someone who does a lot of spec reviews, I take +1s from the right
>>     > people (not always nova-cores) to mean a lot, so much that I regularly
>>     > will simply skim the spec myself before +2ing it. If a subject matter
>>     > expert who I trust +1s a spec, that is usually all I need.
>>     >
>>     > * +1/-1s from the right people have a lot of power on specs. So the
>>     > review burden isn't just on the people with '+W' power.  We may not have
>>     > done a great job of making this point clear.
>>     > * There are many subject matter experts outside nova-core who's vote
>>     > means a lot. For example PTL's of other projects the spec impacts.
>>     >
>>
>>     This is exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance I find hard to not get
>>     upset about :)
>>
>>     Code is what matters ultimately - the devil _is_ in the details, and I
>>     can bet you that it is extremely unlikely that a PTL of any other
>>     project is also going to go and do a detailed review of a feature branch
>>     in Nova, and have the understanding of the state of the surrounding
>>     codebase needed to do it properly. That's what's up to the nova
>>     reviewers to deal with. I too wish Nova code was in a place where it was
>>     possible to just do "architecture", but I think we all agree it's
>>     nowhere near that.
>>
>>
>> This goes back to the point(s) that was brought up over and over again
>> in this thread. I guess we have to agree to disagree.
>>
>> I think saying 'code' is what ultimately matters is misleading.  'Code'
>> is the implementation of an idea. If an idea is bad, so what if the code
>> is good?
>>
>> I wouldn't ask the PTL of say Keystone to review the implementation of
>> some idea in nova, but I do want their opinion on an idea that impacts
>> how nova and keystone interact. Why make someone write a bunch of code,
>> only to find out that the design itself was fundamentally flawed and
>> they have to go back to the drawing board and throw everything out. On
>> top of that now the reviewers has to mentally decouple the idea and the
>> code (unless the feature has good documentation explaining that -- sort
>> of like a spec).
>>
>> That being said, I do think there is definitely room for improvement.
>>
>
> It really goes both way - it's important to state the problem and the
> general direction the implementation plans to take, but anything more
> than that is a distraction from getting to a prototype that will tell us
> more about if the design was in fact fundamentally flawed. We have
> examples of that in tree right now - stuff was written and re-written
> and got better. Spec will never remove the need for that and we should
> not try to make them.

We changed things significantly at the start of kilo:
http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/nova-specs/specs/kilo-template.html

The spec is explicitly about the direction, not the code details.

We need to be clearer about why we are doing specs, and be clear about
how best to use that tool. I am sure we can do much better here.

> Also "throwing code away" is a bit of a straw-man, good code will almost
> never be thrown out entirely, some bits of it - sure (that's software) -
> you may change an interface to a class, or a DB schema detail here and
> there - but if your code is written to be modular and does not leak
> abstractions - you'll end up keeping huge bits of it through rewrites.
> We need more of that!
>
>>
>>     With all due respect to you Joe (and I do have a lot of respect for you)
>>     - I can't get behind how Nova specs puts process and documents over
>>     working and maintainable code. I will never be able to get behind that!
>>
>>
>>
>> So what are you proposing ultimately?  It sounds like the broad
>> consensus here is: specs have made things better, but there is room for
>> improvement (this is my opinion as well). Are you saying just drop specs
>> all together? Because based on the discussion here, there isn't anything
>> near consensus for doing that. So if we aren't going to just revert to
>> how things were before specs, what do you think we should do?
>>
>
> I will follow up with a more detailed email, but in short - acknowledge
> that some problems are fundamentally different than others, decide what
> kind of work absolutely requires an up front discussion (API seems like
> a solid candidate) and drop the blanket requirement for a detailed spec
> for any work (do still require a problem statement though, maybe in a
> lighter format as part of the branch).

To be clear, we dropped the blanket requirement for specs at the start of kilo:
http://docs.openstack.org/developer/nova/blueprints.html

Its not very clear though, in its current form. Help needed with that.

> A lot of it comes back to our release mechanism too, and is definitely
> something we need to work on incrementally.

I really need someone to step up and help document how you can use
release milestones, and the ups and downs of that. And similar things
for using any commit from trunk. We are not good at telling people
about what Nova is delivering/promising when you do that vs using
something with a stable branch.

That should be a help towards discussing adopting semver, in a similar
way to ironic maybe, during the next cycle.

Thanks,
John



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