Open Stack

Hi everyone,

I've been trying to avoid writing this email for the longest time
ever.  It's really painful to have to reach this state, but I think
we've hit a point where we can no longer maintain support for SUSE
within OpenStack Ansible.

Unfortunately, with the recent layoffs, the OSA team has taken a huge
hit in terms of contributors which means that there is far less
contributors within the project.  This means that we have less
resources to go around and it forces us to focus on a more functional,
reliable and well tested set of scenarios.

Over the past few cycles, there has been effort to add SUSE support to
OpenStack Ansible, during the time that we had maintainers, it was
great and SUSE issues were being fixed promptly.  In addition, due to
the larger team at the time, we found ourselves having some extra time
where we can help unbreak other gates.  Jesse used to call this a
"labour of love", which I admired at the time and hoped we continue to
do as much as we can of.

However, the lack of a committed maintainer for OpenSUSE has resulted
in constantly failing jobs[1][2] (which were moved to non-voting,
wasting CI resources as no one fixed them).  In addition, it's causing
several gate blocks for a few times with no one really finding the
time to clean them up.

We are resource constrained at this point and we need the resource to
go towards making the small subset of supported features functional
(i.e. CentOS/Ubuntu).  We struggle with that enough, and there seems
to be no deployers that are running SUSE in real life at the moment
based on bugs submitted.

With that, I propose that we drop SUSE support this cycle.  If anyone
would like to volunteer to maintain it, we can review that option, but
that would require a serious commitment as we've had maintainers step
off and it hurts the velocity of the project as no one can merge code
anymore.

..Really wish I didn't have to write this email
Mohammed

[1]: http://zuul.opendev.org/t/openstack/builds?job_name=openstack-ansible-functional-opensuse-150
[2]: http://zuul.opendev.org/t/openstack/builds?job_name=openstack-ansible-functional-opensuse-423