Open Stack

On 2015-06-11 07:51:55 +0200 (+0200), Philipp Marek wrote:
[...]
> I still stand by my opinion (as voiced in Vancouver) that for such
> one-off things (that contributors are not likely to repeat over
> and over again) it might make sense to have -infra simply *do*
> them[3].
[...]

To reiterate my response from the summit, it's a neat idea but not
one the Infra team has the bandwidth to entertain at the moment. As
you've noticed we're understaffed and while we're continually trying
to grow the team it takes many months to a year or more of full-time
exposure to our current systems to bring new people up to speed to
help us run it. Also we don't actually have a holistic view of the
underlying tests being run by the jobs... for that you need to
elicit assistance from the QA team who maintain DevStack/Tempest and
did the plugin design for things like out-of-tree driver testing,
and also the project teams for the software at which these drivers
and backends are targeted.

So while I and others are happy to have our CI run jobs to test
OpenStack drivers for other free software backends, don't expect the
actual work and learning curve to necessarily be any less than
building your own CI system from scratch (just different).

> It doesn't make sense to require people to learn about things they
> will never use again - and the amount of time spent answering the
> questions, diagnosing problems and so on is quite a bit higher
> than doing it simply right the first time.

This is, I think, also a common misconception. The people who write
these jobs to run in our CI need to stick around or induct
successors to help maintain them and avoid bitrot as our systems
constantly change and evolve. I know the same goes for the drivers
themselves... if people don't keep them current with the OpenStack
software into which they're integrating, support will quickly be
dropped due to quality control concerns.

> And if it's *that* often needed, why not write a small script
> that, given a name, does the needed changes, so that only a commit
> & review is needed?
[...]

Definitely something that people who have experience writing these
could collaborate on contributing. As I mentioned, the Infra team
doesn't have the complete picture, but the people who have sweated
and bled to get their drivers tested and integrated do, at least to
a greater extent than we do.

This is all to say I understand the frustration, but I don't have a
simple solution for it unfortunately.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley