[openstack-dev] Python API docs

Everett Toews everett.toews at RACKSPACE.COM
Thu Nov 8 15:24:09 UTC 2012


On 11/8/12 7:27 AM, "Ian Wells" <ijw.ubuntu at cack.org.uk> wrote:

>On 7 November 2012 00:06, Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Indeed. Not that curl is bad or anything, but the examples, with their
>> use of the X-Auth-Token stuff and multiple calls to first Keystone and
>> then the Nova API endpoint, are confusing if you just want to either:
>>
>> a) Understand the HTTP API calls and parameters
>> b) Want to use the Python bindings
>
>I'd like to point out that, on consideration, I'm not clear that this
>is a documentation problem.  There's an open question of whether there
>is something *to* document.
>
>Firstly which Python bindings are we talking about?  Are the Python
>calls in clients supposed to be an API?  There's not broad consensus
>on this - for instance, the Quantum team consider their bindings not
>to be a public API at the moment (since it's not been published as
>one), which means that they can tidy it up (i.e. change it completely)
>and present it as a nice API in the next release.  As for Glance,
>Nova, and all the rest, I have no idea.
>
>Is there actually consensus on this?
>
>-- 
>Ian.

---

This is a valid point. We did some work on this at the Grizzly Summit that
was captured at [1]. Clearly more work needs to be done.

My impression of the python-<project>client bindings are that they are
unversioned APIs. As you say, they can change significantly and I'm not
sure those changes would necessarily be backwards compatible. This
impression is based partially off of the lack of stable branches in the
client repos [2]. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

I think where Jay was going with his suggestion is some kind of site
focused on helping developers build software on OpenStack. This is
something that will be necessary in the ecosystem but we need to make sure
we deliver quality tools and documentation to those developers that they
can rely on from release to release.

Regards,
Everett

[1] http://wiki.openstack.org/SDKs
[2] https://github.com/openstack/python-<project>client/branches





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