[openstack-dev] Distro defaults [was Re: [oslo.config] Config files overriding CLI: The path of most surprise.]

Vishvananda Ishaya vishvananda at gmail.com
Wed Jul 10 20:22:06 UTC 2013


On Jul 10, 2013, at 5:01 AM, Joe Gordon <joe.gordon0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 8:43 PM, Mark McLoughlin <markmc at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-07-02 at 17:48 +0000, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> > On 2013-07-01 15:10:26 -0700 (-0700), Mark Washenberger wrote:
> > [...]
> > > The talk about permanence confuses me, unless we mean that more
> > > permanent values are overridden by less permanent ones.
> > [...]
> >
> > I think the "permanence" counter argument (which I don't agree with,
> > just recounting it for completeness) was that command-line arguments
> > may be embedded in init scripts by some distributions and then
> > administrators would be surprised when their modifications to the
> > configuration files weren't respected.
> 
> Yes, that was what the "permanence" discussion related to. The example I
> was thinking of was '--logfile /var/log/nova/api.log' which doesn't seem
> like a ridiculous thing to pass via the command line.
> 
> Since we've clearly moved on, I'm not sure replaying old points is very
> constructive, but you have hit on an interesting topic, so ... :)
> 
> > Ultimately, however, any time
> > distribution defaults which could be set in packaged configuration
> > are instead being set with the service command-line in packaged init
> > scripts, I would tend to just consider that a (serious) packaging
> > bug and certainly nothing we should be catering to as a project.
> 
> That's very ... stringent. But I do mostly agree. Distros shouldn't
> stick a tonne of distro defaults on the command line of services.
> 
> The two principles that matter IMHO are:
> 
>   1) users should be able to override defaults
> 
>   2) if a user deletes their config file, they get back to the defaults
> 
> Something we've experimented with in Red Hat OpenStack is to put distro
> defaults in e.g. /usr/share/nova/nova-dist.conf. You can see some of the
> thinking here, for example:
> 
>   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=887334#c4
> 
> The alternative approach would be to patch the code with distro
> defaults.
> 
> Now, you could say that distros shouldn't need to modify the defaults.
> That's fair, but I don't think there's anything too crazy in our distro
> defaults either:
> 
>   https://github.com/redhat-openstack/openstack-nova/blob/master/nova.conf
> 
> 
> I took a look at those and most of the values you have are already the current defaults. The only one that stands out is:
> 
> 
> force_dhcp_release = True
> 
> So my question here, is do you think 'force_dhcp_release = False' is a sane default or should the default be True like you have it?

I would like to see this as True for sure. Historically it was was false because it requires a special binary from dnsmasq that wasn't packaged by the distros.

Vish

> 
> 
> 
>  
> Anyone got other thoughts on how distros should handle this?
> 
> Cheers,
> Mark.
> 
> 
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