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On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 12:09:26PM +0200, Salvatore Orlando wrote:
> I think there will soon be a discussion regarding what the appropriate
> location for plugin and drivers should be.
> My personal feeling is that Neutron has simply reached the tipping point
> where the high number of drivers and plugins is causing unnecessary load
> for the core team and frustration for the community.
> 
> There I would totally support Luke's initiative about maintaining an
> out-of-tree ML2 driver. On the other hand, a plugin/driver "diaspora" might
> also have negative consequences such as frequent breakages such as those
> Bob was mentioning or confusion for users which might need to end up
> fetching drivers from disparate sources.
> 
> As mentioned during the last Neutron IRC meeting this is another "process"
> aspect which will be discussed soon, with the aim of defining a plan for:
> - drastically reduce the number of plugins and drivers which must be
> maintained in the main source tree
> - enhance control of plugin/driver maintainers over their own code
> - preserve the ability of doing CI checks on gerrit as we do today
> - raise the CI bar (maybe finally set the smoketest as a minimum
> requirement?)

Note also that there is a communications channel between Nova and Neutron
that has to pass port binding info when plugging VIFs, so that Nova can
configure things in the right way. 

The definition of the valid metadata in this API is not something that
I would consider external plugins to be permitted to extend/change as
it is a semi-public communications channel, not merely an internal
implementation detail. Also note that from Juno onwards Nova no longer
supports out of tree VIF driver implementations because we do not
consider the VIF driver classes to be a public extension point.

So if a Neutron plugin is to live out of tree, it needs to be able to
work with the VIF port binding metadata that is officially supported
in-tree by Neutron & Nova, and with an in-tree Nova VIF driver.

Regards,
Daniel
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