Open Stack

On Mon, 15 Jun 2015, Clint Byrum wrote:

> I'm a little bit worried that we don't have a guiding principle to point
> at somewhere. Perhaps the API WG can encode guidance either way ("We use
> project names", or "we use service types").

I think it's a good idea to encode the principle, whatever it is,
but it feels like we are a rather long way from consensus on the
way to go.

There's a visible camp that would like to say that competing
projects should be competing over the effectiveness of their
implementation of a canonical (or even platonic) API.

In principle I have a lot of sympathy for this idea but it sort of begs
or presumes that the APIs that exist are:

* in the realm of or at least on their way to being "good enough"
* have some measure of stability
* should not themselves be overly subject to competitive forces

(at least two of these items are not true)

If that's the case, then we can imagine two different services both
of which implement the official compute API versions 2.blah to 3.foop
inclusive. That's probably an awful lot of work for everyone
involved?

Another way to look at things is that each project is seeking
knowledge about how to form a good API for a particular service but
nobody is quite there yet. In the meantime, if you use implementation X,
it's got microversions, please keep track.

And maybe someday microversion X of implementation Y will become
_the_ declared API for service Z? That could make a lot of people
feel like they've wasted effort.

I don't know where things are. Does anyone?

-- 
Chris Dent tw:@anticdent freenode:cdent
https://tank.peermore.com/tanks/cdent