Technical Committee[1]

Monday- 25 people

Monday we focused on the relationship between the Project Team Leads (PTLs) and the Technical Committee (TC). We discussed the role of the TC, and what PTLs look to us for, what we should be doing that we are not, what we are doing that we shouldn’t be. Things we do that maybe might not be the best use of everyone’s time, etc. 

Some of the main things that came out of discussions were:

• Creating a repo (possibly) to house documents about how certain things should be implemented if a project is going to implement them, for example quotas. These technical guidelines will hopefully give more direction to new projects entering the OpenStack space and help unify and standardize the implementations of features across already established OpenStack projects. These documents will not have accompanying deadlines like community goals, but will instead be used as resources and reference documents to further enhance OpenStack. 

• How to engage with OpenStack Operators and get them to be more vocal about feedback and encouraging interaction with the project specific communities with regards to bugs and project direction. Ideas included making sure to use the [ops] tag on emails to the openstack-discuss list and ensuring that users and operators know the mailing list is for them just as much as it is for developers. Also, making sure to communicate topics to the twitter handle for wider engagement to those that might not be watching the mailing list closely.    

Thursday- 18 people

Another full day of discussions. We covered the Docs SIG state of affairs, Yoga testing runtime, TC tags, a project adoption ladder, and release name process changes (yes, again). 

The tldrs; of all of that: 

• Some of the Docs SIG repos are being retired, some are going to live with the First Contact SIG. 

• Python 3.9 is now a voting test and 3.10 will be added as non voting. Python 3.6 will be kept until CentOS Stream 8 is replaced by Stream 9. 

• There is a proposal to drop the tag framework altogether[1.1].

• We do NOT want to add a whole process for incubating new projects; simply keep the process we have and apply a ‘tech preview’ note to their first release where applicable. 

• We are going to change back to having the community vote for the names which will also be proposed by the community, but also pre-vetted by the community before voting begins. The final vetting will be the Open Infra Foundation’s legal team as it always has been. 

Friday- 28 people

Another nother full day of discussions! We covered operator pain point targeting, Skyline project proposal, RBAC, Community Goals, Xena Wrap up, and were also joined at the very end by several members of the Kubernetes Steering Committee (YAY cross community collaboration!).

Those tldrs; 

• We want to make sure all the pain points are being actively tracked and if there are things that are common across many projects those get more attention as potential community goals down the road. 

• Skyline is largely ready to be proposed as a project. There are a few things that might need to get rearranged and changed so that it can be released as a part of OpenStack but that shouldn’t stop them from being approved. They could be included in the Yoga release as a ‘tech preview’.

• I don’t even know how to summarize the RBAC stuff lol. That one I can’t tldr for you. Go check out those notes in the etherpad[1].

• The main thing we discussed wrt community goals is that things like RBAC that we want as a community goal cannot be scoped to a single release and we are fine with that. 

• In the Xena wrap up, we did a retrospective of the things we accomplished and also agreed to keep monthly video meetings in the upcoming cycle. 

• We again loved having members of the k8s steering committee join us! We chatted about how the CNCF project ladder works, how the OpenStack’s ‘Upstream Investment Opportunities' works, and CI/CD resourcing struggles for both communities. 

OpenStackSDK / OpenStackClient[2] - 10 people

First we kicked off with Artem giving us an update on the r1 branch which is nearing the point that we can merge it! There is only one part missing- compute has not been completely reconfigured to use proxy; there are still a number of sections of the code that rely on the cloud layer and directly touch the APIs. Once that is completed however; we will be able to merge r1 into master and celebrate! We legitimately discussed having a party and publicizing it, so if you have opinions about any of that (or want to help wrap things up), please reach out to us in #openstack-sdks. 

We talked a little bit about the exceptional cases where we might consider deprecating OSC commands. Basically we concluded that we still don’t want to do it except in very specific circumstances. We are generally okay with doing it for removed APIs such that they are actually being completely removed from the API and not just removed in a microversion and are essentially still reachable in older microversions. 

Lastly, we chatted with the Korea user group about their mentoring program that is in the process of wrapping up. It sounds like it will be a yearly thing for them and we (the SDK team) want to try to help support those efforts more going forward if the organizers of the mentoring program can give us heads up like they did this last time. We look forward to working with them more in the future!

First Contact SIG[3] - 2 people

Discussions were pretty brief as not many people attended, but we did follow up on a discussion earlier in the day that the Technical Committee had about having the First Contact SIG become the new owners of a couple of repositories formerly owned by the Docs SIG (a reaction to a general lack of spoons on that team and moving in the direction of moving the status of that SIG inactive). The First Contact SIG agreed to take ownership of the contributor-guide repo and the training-guides repo. Work on that migration/reconfiguration of ACLs will begin soon. If you have any questions or are interested in getting involved, please contact the First Contact SIG or the Technical Committee 

OpenDev[4] - 4 people

The session was mostly just a working one, but we also had a little time to catch up and chat and stay connected as a team :) Not much to say here really. 

Skyline[5]- 4 people

I attended their sessions on Tuesday and while it was largely quiet when I was there we did chat a little bit about the upcoming TC discussions about the project and I invited them to join in those- spoiler; they came! 

Release Management [6] - 6 People

The largest topic we discussed in the release management ptg session was everyone’s favorite topic- release cadence! We talked about how it might finally be time to move to 12 month cadence. Things have slowed down sufficiently with regards to feature development (and this has been consistent throughout the last couple releases). It would reduce the frequent upgrades that distros have to work through, and the process we currently maintain can be easily stretched to accommodate a year. All in all, the release team supports the idea and think that if we are to make the transition, when we finish the ‘Z’ release and start over at the beginning of the alphabet again, that would be a natural time to also switch to a one year release cycle rather than the 6th month cadence we have been keeping up with for quite some time. The decision is ultimately up to the Technical Committee, but the release team supports the idea.  

-Kendall Nelson (diablo_rojo)

[1] https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/tc-yoga-ptg 

[1.1] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-discuss/2021-October/025571.html 

[2] https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/oct2021-ptg-sdk-cli 

[3] https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/oct2021-ptg-first-contact 

[4] https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/oct2021-ptg-opendev 

[5] https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/oct2021-ptg-skyline

[6] https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/relmgmt-yoga-ptg