Open Stack

On Sat, Mar 4, 2017 at 6:13 PM, Andre Florath <andre at florath.net> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> Thanks Greg for sharing your thoughts.  The idea of splitting off DIB
> from OpenStack is new for me, therefore I collect some pros and
> cons:
>
> Stay in OpenStack:
>
> + Use available OpenStack infrastructure and methods
> + OpenStack should include a possibility to create images for ironic,
>   VMs and docker. (Yes - there are others, but DIB is the best! :-) )
> + Customers use DIB because it's part of OpenStack and for OpenStack
>   (see e.g. [1])
> + Popularity of OpenStack attracts more developers than a separate
>   project (IMHO running DIB as a separate project even lowers the low
>   number of contributors).
> + 'Short Distances' if there are special needs for OpenStack.
> + Some OpenStack projects use DIB - and also use internal 'knowledge'
>   (like build-, run- or test-dependencies) - it would be not that easy
>   to completely separate this in short term.
>
> As a separate project:
>
> - Possibly less organizational overhead.
> - Independent releases possible.
> - Develop / include / concentrate also for / on other non-OpenStack
>   based virtualization platforms (EC2, Google Cloud, ...)
> - Extend the use cases to something like 'DIB can install a wide range
>   of Linux distributions on everything you want'.
>   Example: DIB Element to install Raspberry Pi [2] (which is currently
>   not the core use-case but shows how flexible DIB is).
>
> In my opinion the '+' arguments are more important, therefore DIB
> should stay within OpenStack as a sub-project.  I don't really care
> about the master: TripleO, Infra, glance, ...
>
>
> I want to touch an important point: Greg you are right that there are
> only a very few developers contributing for DIB.  One reason
> is IMHO, that it is not very attractive to work on DIB; some examples:
>
> o The documentation how to set up a DIB development environment [3]
>   is out of date.
> o Testing DIB is nightmare: a developer has no chance to test
>   as it is done in the CI (which is currently setup by other OpenStack
>   projects?). Round-trip times of ~2h - and then it often fails,
>   because of some mirror problem...
> o It takes sometimes very long until a patch is reviewed and merged
>   (e.g. still open since 1y1d [6]; basic refactoring [7] was filed
>   about 9 month ago and still not in the master).
> o There are currently about 100 elements in DIB. Some of them are
>   highly hardware dependent; some are known not to work; a lot of them
>   need refactoring.
>
> It is important to work on these topics to make DIB more attractive and
> possible have more contributors.  Discussions about automated
> development environment setup [4] or better developer tests [5] started
> but need more attention and discussions (and maybe a different setting
> than a patch / review).
> In addition we should concentrate on the core functionalities: block
> device setup, minimal system installation, bootloader, kernel and
> ramdisk creation and a stable extensible element interface; drop
> non-core elements or move them to the projects where they are used.
>
> Kind regards
>
> Andre
>
>
> [1] https://imagefactory.otc.t-systems.com/
> [2] https://github.com/florath/dib-element-raspberrypi3
> [3] https://docs.openstack.org/developer/diskimage-builder/
> developer/index.html
> [4] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/419655/
> [5] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/414347/
> [6] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/287784/
> [7] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/319591/
>
>
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Merging into infra sounds pragmatic, especially if a lack of testing / CI
presence is an area that needs improvement. Yolanda from infra has been
very active in DIB as of recent (in terms of CI).

Unless there are strong objections, infra seems a good choice of home to
me.
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