[openstack-dev] [Horizon] How do we move forward with xstatic releases?

Richard Jones r1chardj0n3s at gmail.com
Tue Mar 8 04:52:57 UTC 2016


We've solved *most* of the issues around releasing new xstatic packages,
documented here[1] (and related documentation).

We have one final issue that's blocking us, which is that during the
xstatic release there will be a point at which Horizon may be broken from
an integrated point of view - some of the interfaces may not work and fail
tests. The process goes something like this:

​Note: this assumes that depends-on can reliably bring in patches from all
over the place into a gate environment, which is technically possible, but
not necessarily correct today.

The problem is that because we can't atomically update both
upper-constraints *and* Horizon at the same time (or upper-constraints
*and* xstatic-angular, or Horizon *and* xstatic-angular) we run into a
situation where Horizon will be running against the wrong version of
xstatic-angular.

So we break one of the basic assumptions of the OpenStack world: that every
single commit in every repository for the integrated environment will pass
tests.

In the Python world, we code around this by making Horizon compatible with
both the X and X1 versions of xstatic-angular (if it was a Python library).
In Javascript land this is much more difficult - Javascript libraries tend
to break compatibility in far more interesting ways. Maintaining
compatibility across CSS and font releases is also a difficult problem,
though changes here are unlikely to break Horizon enough that gate tests
would fail. So, solution 1 to the problem is:

SOLUTION 1: always maintain Horizon compatibility across xstatic library
releases.

This is potentially very difficult to guarantee. So, a second solution has
been proposed:

SOLUTION 2: move the upper-constraints information for *the xstatic
libraries only* from the global upper-constraints file into Horizon's
repository.

This allows us to atomically update both Horizon and the xstatic library
version, removing the potential to break because of the version mismatch.
Unfortunately it means that we have version compatibility issues with
anything else that wants to install alongside Horizon that also uses
xstatic packages. For example, Horizon plugins. We could move Horizon
plugins into the Horizon repository to solve this. /ducks

A variation on this solution is:

SOLUTION 3: allow Horizon to locally override upper-constraints for the
time needed to merge a patch in devstack.

This solution allows Horizon to atomically update itself and the xstatic
library, but it also means installing Horizon in a CI/CD environment
becomes more difficult due to the need to always pull down the
upper-constraints file and edit it. We could code this in to tox, but that
doesn't help eg. devstack which needs to also do this thing.

SOLUTION 4: vendor the javascript

Heh.

SOLUTION 5: have dependencies on xstatic move from global requirements to
Horizon

This is similar to 2 & 3 with some of the same drawbacks (multiple users of
xstatic) but also we'd need a change to global-requirements handling to
ignore some entries in Horizon's requirements.

Your thoughts on any and all of the above are requested.


    Richard

[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/289142/
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