[OpenStack-Infra] Biting the bullet on issue tracking

Michael Krotscheck krotscheck at gmail.com
Mon Mar 23 23:28:44 UTC 2015


Hey everyone!

It's quite rough to realize that the thing you've been advocating, working
on, and desperately trying to recruit contributors for is DoA, and that's
what I've been struggling with for the past few weeks. Even so, I was part
and parcel to coming up with Monty's recommendation, so this wasn't a
surprise.

Don't get me wrong: I love the project. I love the team, I love our
technological vision, I love all these things. There are features that I
feel are unique - Federation, process-agnosticism, clean api/ui separation,
etc. - and given the opportunity (and proper resources) I would love to
continue working on it. However for all the excitement that I've received
over the past year, very little has solidified into any kind of concrete
contribution. It was time to call the bluff.

And yet... StoryBoard has been a fantastic test bed for JavaScript as a
first class citizen in OpenStack, and I'm going to continue moving that
forward. There are some missing parts of our infrastructure, some of our
existing tools need to be refined and documented, and there are some sticky
policy items that need to be proposed to the TC. I see no reason not to
continue supporting StoryBoard as that test bed, especially since the
infrastructure team is still using it. Once a reasonable sunset has been
reached (assuming new contributors don't magically materialize), my plan is
to dive into the other UI components in OpenStack.

A very special thank you Yolanda Robla-Mota, Mike Heald, Riccardo Cruz,
Nikita Konovalov, Aleksey Ripinien, Tom Pollard, and all the others who
have contributed over the past year. Y'all are awesome.

Michael

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 4:03 PM Monty Taylor <mordred at inaugust.com> wrote:

> Hi everybody,
>
> First, some background:
>
> A year and a half ago, Infra started down the road of of writing a
> replacement for the pieces of Launchpad that OpenStack continues to use.
> There were several reasons, but notable amongst them are:
>
> - Desire to use the forthcoming openstackid OpenID/Oauth as an SSO
> - Delay in long-standing bugs that affect OpenStack getting fixed
>
> The existing open source offerings that we investigated did not have
> adequate feature parity in the key data model areas that made Launchpad
> particularly compelling as a choice for us, and adding what we needed to
> the existing offerings would amount to substantial rewrites ... so we
> decided that we had no real choice but to write our own.
>
> Where we're at
>
> We've gotten far enough to get Infra moved on to storyboard, but the
> project has never really gotten resourced to the level it needs to be to
> truly responsive to the needs of our community. We're making good
> progress towards meeting the initial set of goals we set, but in the
> mean time several new requests have come in - such as from the UX team
> and the Product Management Working Group - that we cannot meet today and
> which at our current rate I do not believe we would be able to meet in a
> reasonable timeframe.
>
> At the same time, the state of the art around us has improved since we
> started. A year and a half ago, I was able to very honestly say that we
> needed to work on this effort because we simply had no other choice.
> That is no longer true. Existing Open Source offerings not only can
> represent a large portion of our data needs, but additionally can
> support the additional features that have been requested by our
> community today out of the box.
>
> The combination of the two of those makes the likelihood of us being
> able to convince people to pony up more resources seem more and more far
> fetched. I could be wrong, of course - it's possible that in response to
> this someone will start jumping up and down and commit engineers to the
> effort ... but I'm not holding my breath.
>
> Biting the bullet
>
> I think we should get out of the business of writing our own bug tracker.
>
> It's not an easy thing to say, and I don't say it lightly. There are
> things that storyboard models well that continue to be things that
> simply are not modeled elsewhere. However, I think it's important to
> know when good enough will do, and I think it's important to be able to
> step up and say that we tried valiantly, and everyone involved did a
> great job, and yet the world has moved on and writing a bug tracker is
> not, at the end of the day, what we're all here to do.
>
> We're looking at what our options are, and Thierry is examining them to
> see how tolerable their differences would be to our community.
>
> I propose that we have a solid answer and migration plan to put in front
> of people by Vancouver at the latest.
>
> Finally, I'd like to say thank you to the storyboard team for attacking
> a very hard problem with not enough resources.
>
> Monty
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenStack-Infra mailing list
> OpenStack-Infra at lists.openstack.org
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-infra
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-infra/attachments/20150323/3b3f9c0a/attachment.html>


More information about the OpenStack-Infra mailing list