Open Stack

On 08/06/2015 01:53 PM, Christopher Aedo wrote:
> Today during the app-catalog IRC meeting we talked about hosting Heat
> templates for contributors.  Right now someone who wants to create
> their own templates can easily self-host them on github, but until
> they get people pointed at it, nobody will know about their work on
> that template, and getting guidance and feedback from all the people
> who know Heat well takes a fair amount of effort.

Discoverability is a problem, but so is ownership in the shared repo
case. There's also the heat-templates repo, which has some example
content and such.

> What do you think about us creating a new repo (app-catalog-heat
> perhaps), and collectively we could encourage those interested in
> contributing Heat templates to host them there?  Ideally members of
> the Heat community would become reviewers of the content, and give
> guidance and feedback. 

I think being able to review something requires a lot more than "hey we
have a central/shared repo," including having some shared purpose and
knowledge of the goal.

Of course, people with heat knowledge can look at templates and say
things like "well that's not valid YAML," but that's not really a code
review. I'd much rather see folks come to IRC or ask.openstack with
specific questions so we can 1) answer them or 2) improve our docs.

Having a shared repo of "here are some heat templates" doesn't strike me
as incredibly useful, especially if the templates don't all go together
and make one big thingy.

> It would also allow us to hook into OpenStack
> CI so these templates could be tested, and contributors would have a
> better sense of the utility/portability of their templates.  Over time
> it could lead to much more exposure for all the useful Heat templates
> people are creating.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> -Christopher

What do you imagine these templates being for? Are people creating
little reusable snippets/nested stacks that can be incorporated into
someone else's infrastructure? Or standalone templates for stuff like
"here, instant mongodb cluster"?

Also, the obvious question of the central repo is "how does reviewing
work?" are heat cores expected to also be cores on this new repo, or
maybe just take anything that gets 5 +1's?

-- 
Ryan Brown / Software Engineer, Openstack / Red Hat, Inc.