Open Stack

On 10/11/2013 12:04 PM, John Griffith wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Bob Ball <bob.ball at citrix.com
> <mailto:bob.ball at citrix.com>> wrote:
> 
>     > -----Original Message-----
>     > From: Russell Bryant [mailto:rbryant at redhat.com
>     <mailto:rbryant at redhat.com>]
>     > Sent: 11 October 2013 15:18
>     > To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
>     <mailto: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
> 
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>     OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
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> 
> 
> 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.

Really good points here.  I'm glad you jumped in, because the underlying
issue here applies well to other projects (especially Cinder and Neutron).

So, the alternative to the split official repos is to either:

1) Stay in tree, participate, and help share the burden of maintenance
of the project

or

2) Truly be a vendor project, and to make that more clear, split out
into your own (not nova) repository.

#2 really isn't so bad if that's what you want, and it honestly sounds
like this may be the case for the Hyper-V team.  You could still be very
close to the OpenStack community by using the same tools.  Use
stackforge for the code (same gerrit, jenkins, etc), and have your own
launchpad project.  If you go that route, you get all of the control you
want, but the project is still very closely tied to the rest of the code
in the OpenStack community.

-- 
Russell Bryant