Open Stack

On 10/02/2014 01:47 PM, Jay Pipes wrote:
> On 10/02/2014 03:14 PM, Chris Friesen wrote:
>> On 10/01/2014 12:37 PM, Jay Pipes wrote:
>>
>>> IMO, the term "state" should be the only one used in the OpenStack APIs
>>> to refer to the condition of some thing at a point in time. The term
>>> "state" can and should be prefaced with a refining descriptor such
>>> "task" or "power" to denote the *thing* that the state represents a
>>> condition for.
>>>
>>> One direct change I would make would be that Neutron's "admin_state_up"
>>> field would be instead "admin_state" with values of UP, DOWN (and maybe
>>> UNKNOWN?) instead of having the *same* GET /networks/{network_id} call
>>> return *both* a boolean "admin_state_up" field *and* a "status" field
>>> with a string value like "ACTIVE". :(
>>
>> Hi Jay,
>>
>> I wonder if this would tie into our other discussion about
>> distinguishing between the "desired state" vs the "actual state".
>> Conceivably you could have the "admin state" be UP, but a fault has
>> resulted in an "actual state" other than "ACTIVE".
>
> My comment above was about the inconsistency of how things are named and
> the data types representing them. There is a status field of type
> string, and an admin_state_up field of type boolean, both in the same
> response. Why wasn't it called admin_state and made a string field to
> follow the convention of the status field? I'm guessing it probably has
> to do with the telecom IT recommendations you cite below...

Sorry, I misread your statement to mean that there should be only a 
single state field rather than a comment on the type of the variable.

The telecom administrative state values are "locked", "unlocked", and 
"shutting down", so it seems unlikely that they would be the impetus for 
the Neutron values.

> If we do use telecom IT as a guide, we'll be in a worse state (pun
> intended), ease-of-use and user-friendliness-wise, than we already are,
> and literally every API will just be a collection of random three and
> four letter acronyms with nobody other than a veteran network engineer
> understanding how anything works.
>
> In other words, all our APIs would look like the Neutron API as it
> exists today.

:)

Chris