Open Stack

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Bob Ball <bob.ball at citrix.com> wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Russell Bryant [mailto:rbryant at redhat.com]
> > Sent: 11 October 2013 15:18
> > To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> > Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [Hyper-V] Havana status
> >
> > > As a practical example for Nova: in our case that would simply include
> the
> > following subtrees: "nova/virt/hyperv" and "nova/tests/virt/hyperv".
> >
> > If maintainers of a particular driver would prefer this sort of
> > autonomy, I'd rather look at creating new repositories.  I'm completely
> > open to going that route on a per-driver basis.  Thoughts?
>
> I think that all drivers that are officially supported must be treated in
> the same way.
>
> If we are going to split out drivers into a separate but still official
> repository then we should do so for all drivers.  This would allow Nova
> core developers to focus on the architectural side rather than how each
> individual driver implements the API that is presented.
>
> Of course, with the current system it is much easier for a Nova core to
> identify and request a refactor or generalisation of code written in one or
> multiple drivers so they work for all of the drivers - we've had a few of
> those with XenAPI where code we have written has been pushed up into Nova
> core rather than the XenAPI tree.
>
> Perhaps one approach would be to re-use the incubation approach we have;
> if drivers want to have the fast-development cycles uncoupled from core
> reviewers then they can be moved into an incubation project.  When there is
> a suitable level of integration (and automated testing to maintain it of
> course) then they can graduate.  I imagine at that point there will be more
> development of new features which affect Nova in general (to expose each
> hypervisor's strengths), so there would be fewer cases of them being
> restricted just to the virt/* tree.
>
> Bob
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenStack-dev mailing list
> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
>

I've thought about this in the past, but always come back to a couple of
things.

Being a community driven project, if a vendor doesn't want to participate
in the project then why even pretend (ie having their own project/repo,
reviewers etc).  Just post your code up in your own github and let people
that want to use it pull it down.  If it's a vendor project, then that's
fine; have it be a vendor project.

In my opinion pulling out and leaving things up to the vendors as is being
described has significant negative impacts.  Not the least of which is
consistency in behaviors.  On the Cinder side, the core team spends the
bulk of their review time looking at things like consistent behaviors,
missing features or paradigms that are introduced that "break" other
drivers.  For example looking at things like, are all the base features
implemented, do they work the same way, are we all using the same
vocabulary, will it work in an multi-backend environment.  In addition,
it's rare that a vendor implements a new feature in their driver that
doesn't impact/touch the core code somewhere.

Having drivers be a part of the core project is very valuable in my
opinion.  It's also very important in my view that the core team for Nova
actually has some idea and notion of what's being done by the drivers that
it's supporting.  Moving everybody further and further into additional
private silos seems like a very bad direction to me, it makes things like
knowledge transfer, documentation and worst of all bug triaging extremely
difficult.

I could go on and on here, but nobody likes to hear anybody go on a rant.
 I would just like to see if there are other alternatives to improving the
situation than fragmenting the projects.

John
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/attachments/20131011/d7e3b7b6/attachment.html>