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Hi Sahdev,

On Tue, Sep 02, 2014 at 11:52:30AM -0400, Sahdev P Zala wrote:
>    Hello guys,
>     
>    As you know, the heat-translator project was started early this year with
>    an aim to create a tool to translate non-Heat templates to HOT. It is a
>    StackForge project licensed under Apache 2. We have made good progress
>    with its development and a demo was given at the OpenStack 2014 Atlanta
>    summit during a half-a-day session that was dedicated to heat-translator
>    project and related TOSCA discussion. Currently the development and
>    testing is done with the TOSCA template format but the tool is designed to
>    be generic enough to work with templates other than TOSCA. There are five
>    developers actively contributing to the development. In addition, all
>    current Heat core members are already core members of the heat-translator
>    project.
> 
>    Recently, I attended Heat Mid Cycle Meet Up for Juno in Raleigh and
>    updated the attendees on heat-translator project and ongoing progress. I
>    also requested everyone for a formal adoption of the project in the
>    python-heatclient and the consensus was that it is the right thing to do.
>    Also when the project was started, the initial plan was to make it
>    available in python-heatclient. Hereby, the heat-translator team would
>    like to make a request to have the heat-translator project to be adopted
>    by the python-heatclient/Heat program.

Obviously I wasn't at the meetup, so I may be missing some context here,
but can you answer some questions please?

- Is the scope for heat-translator only tosca simple-profile, or also the
  original more heavyweight tosca too?

- If it's only tosca simple-profile, has any thought been given to moving
  towards implementing support via a template parser plugin, rather than
  baking the translation into the client?

While I see this effort as valuable, integrating the translator into the
client seems the worst of all worlds to me:

- Any users/services not intefacing to heat via python-heatclient can't use it

- You prempt the decision about integration with any higher level services,
  e.g Mistral, Murano, Solum, if you bake in the translator at the
  heat level.

The scope question is probably key here - if you think the translator can
do (or will be able to do) a 100% non-lossy conversion to HOT using only
Heat, maybe it's time we considered discussing integration into Heat the
service rather than the client.

Conversely, if you're going to need other services to fully implement the
spec, it probably makes sense for the translator to remain layered over
heat (or integrated with another project which is layered over heat).

Thanks!

Steve