Open Stack

On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 1:03 AM, Devananda van der Veen
<devananda.vdv at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to bring up the topic of drivers which, for one reason or another,
> are probably never going to have third party CI testing.
>
> Take for example the iBoot driver proposed here:
>   https://review.openstack.org/50977
>
> I would like to encourage this type of driver as it enables individual
> contributors, who may be using off-the-shelf or home-built systems, to
> benefit from Ironic's ability to provision hardware, even if that hardware
> does not have IPMI or another enterprise-grade out-of-band management
> interface. However, I also don't expect the author to provide a full
> third-party CI environment, and as such, we should not claim the same level
> of test coverage and consistency as we would like to have with drivers in
> the gate.

+1

>
> As it is, Ironic already supports out-of-tree drivers. A python module that
> registers itself with the appropriate entrypoint will be made available if
> the ironic-conductor service is configured to load that driver. For what
> it's worth, I recall Nova going through a very similar discussion over the
> last few cycles...
>
> So, why not just put the driver in a separate library on github or
> stackforge?

I would like to have this drivers within the Ironic tree under a
separated directory (e.g /drivers/staging/, not exactly same but kinda
like what linux has in their tree[1]). The advatanges of having it in
the main ironic tree is because it makes it easier to other people
access the drivers, easy to detect and fix changes in the Ironic code
that would affect the driver, share code with the other drivers, add
unittests and provide a common place for development.

We can create some rules for people who are thinking about submitting
their driver under the staging directory, it should _not_ be a place
where you just throw the code and forget it, we would need to agree
that the person submitting the code will also babysit it, we also
could use the same process for all the other drivers wich wants to be
in the Ironic tree to be accepted which is going through ironic-specs.

Thoughts?

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/285599/

Cheers,
Lucas