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Hi Chris,

>The documentation is NOT the canonical source for the behaviour of the API, currently the code should be seen as the reference. We've run into issues before where people have tried to align code to the fit the documentation and made backwards incompatible changes (although this is not one).

I’ve never seen this defined before – is this published as official Openstack  or Nova policy ?

Personally I think we should be putting as much effort into reviewing the API docs as we do API code so that we can say that the API docs are the canonical source for behavior.    Not being able to fix bugs in say input validation that escape code reviews because they break backwards compatibility seems to be a weakness to me.


Phil



From: Christopher Yeoh [mailto:cbkyeoh at gmail.com]
Sent: 13 June 2014 04:00
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [Nova] Review guidelines for API patches

On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Matt Riedemann <mriedem at linux.vnet.ibm.com<mailto:mriedem at linux.vnet.ibm.com>> wrote:


On 6/12/2014 5:58 PM, Christopher Yeoh wrote:
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 8:06 AM, Michael Still <mikal at stillhq.com<mailto:mikal at stillhq.com>
<mailto:mikal at stillhq.com<mailto:mikal at stillhq.com>>> wrote:

    In light of the recent excitement around quota classes and the
    floating ip pollster, I think we should have a conversation about the
    review guidelines we'd like to see for API changes proposed against
    nova. My initial proposal is:

      - API changes should have an associated spec


+1

      - API changes should not be merged until there is a tempest change to
    test them queued for review in the tempest repo


+1

Chris

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We do have some API change guidelines here [1].  I don't want to go overboard on every change and require a spec if it's not necessary, i.e. if it falls into the 'generally ok' list in that wiki.  But if it's something that's not documented as a supported API (so it's completely new) and is pervasive (going into novaclient so it can be used in some other service), then I think that warrants some spec consideration so we don't miss something.

To compare, this [2] is an example of something that is updating an existing API but I don't think warrants a blueprint since I think it falls into the 'generally ok' section of the API change guidelines.

So really I see this a new feature, not a bug fix. Someone thought that detail was supported when writing the documentation but it never was. The documentation is NOT the canonical source for the behaviour of the API, currently the code should be seen as the reference. We've run into issues before where people have tried to align code to the fit the documentation and made backwards incompatible changes (although this is not one).

Perhaps we need a streamlined queue for very simple API changes, but I do think API changes should get more than the usual review because we have to live with them for so long (short of an emergency revert if we catch it in time).

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/APIChangeGuidelines
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/99443/

--

Thanks,

Matt Riedemann



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