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-functi... [2]: http://zuul.opendev.org/t/openstack/builds?job_name=openstack-ansible-functi...