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On 06/04/2015 08:58 AM, Xu, Hejie wrote:
> Hi, guys,
> I’m working on adding Microversion into the API-WG’s guideline which
> make sure we have consistent Microversion behavior in the API for user.
> The Nova and Ironic already have Microversion implementation, and as I
> know Magnum _https://review.openstack.org/#/c/184975/_ is going to
> implement Microversion also.
> Hope all the projects which support( or plan to) Microversion can join
> the review of guideline.
> The Mircoversion specification(this almost copy from nova-specs):
> _https://review.openstack.org/#/c/187112_
> And another guideline for when we should bump Mircoversion
> _https://review.openstack.org/#/c/187896/_
> As I know, there already have a little different between Nova and
> Ironic’s implementation. Ironic return min/max version when the requested
> version doesn’t support in server by http-headers. There isn’t such
> thing in nova. But that is something for version negotiation we need for
> nova also.
> Sean have pointed out we should use response body instead of http
> headers, the body can includes error message. Really hope ironic team
> can take a
> look at if you guys have compelling reason for using http headers.
> And if we think return body instead of http headers, we probably need
> think about back-compatible also. Because Microversion itself isn’t
> versioned.
> So I think we should keep those header for a while, does make sense?
> Hope we have good guideline for Microversion, because we only can change
> Mircoversion itself by back-compatible way.
> Thanks
> Alex Xu

Hi all!

I'd like to try put in feedback based on living with microversions in 
Kilo release of Ironic.

First of all, after talking to folks off-list, I realized that we all, 
and the spec itself, confuse 3 aspects of microversion usage:

1. protecting from breaking changes.
This is clearly a big win from user's point of view, and it allowed us 
to conduct painful change with renaming an important node state in our 
state machine. It will allows us even worse change this cycle: change of 
the default state.

2. API discoverability.
While I believe that there maybe be better implementation of this idea, 
I think I got it now. People want services to report API versions they 
support. People want to be able to request a specific version, and fail 
early if it is not present. Also +1 from me.

3. hiding new features from older clients
This is not directly stated by the spec, but many people imply it, and 
Nova and Ironic did it in Kilo. I want us to be clear: it is not the 
same as #2. You can report versions, but still allow new features to be 
used.

It is this particular thing that gets -2 from me, after I've seen how it 
worked in practice, and that's why.

First of all, I don't believe anyone needs it. Seriously, I can't 
imagine a user asking "please prevent me from using non-breaking 
changes". And attempt to implement it was IMO a big failure for the 
following reasons:

a) It's hard to do. Even we, the core team, got confused, and for 
non-core people it took several iteration to do right. It's a big load 
on both developers and reviewers.

b) It's incomplete (at least for Ironic). We have several API-exposed 
things that are just impossible to hide. Good example are node states: 
if node is in a new state, we can't but expose it to older tooling. Our 
free-form JSON fields properties, instance_info, driver_info and 
driver_internal_info are examples as well. It's useless to speak about 
API contract, while we have those.

c) It gives additional push back to making (required) breaking changes. 
We already got suggestions to have ONE MORE feature gating for breaking 
changes. Reason: people will need to increase microversions to get 
features, and your breaking change will prevent it.

d) It requires a hard compromise on the CLI tool. You either default it 
to 1.0 forever, and force all the people to get used to figuring out 
version numbers and using `ironic --ironic-api-version x.y` every time 
(terrible user experience), or you default it to some known good 
version, bumping it from time to time. This, in turn, has 2 more serious 
problems:

d.1) you start to break people \o/ that's not a theoretical concern: our 
downstream tooling did get broken by updating to newer ironicclient from git

d.2) you require complex version negotiations on the client side. 
Otherwise imaging CLI tool defaulting to 1.6 will issue `node-create` to 
Ironic supporting only 1.5. Guess what? It will fail despite node-create 
being very old feature. Again, that's not something theoretical: that's 
how we broke TripleO CI.

e) Every microversion should be fully tested separately. Which ended up 
in Ironic having 4 versions 1.2-1.5 that were never ever gate tested. 
Even worse, initially, our gate tested only the oldest version 1.1, but 
we solved it (though it took time to realize). The only good thing here 
is that these versions 1.2-1.5 were probably never used by anyone.


To sum this long post up, I'm seeing that hiding new features based on 
microversions brings much more problems, than it solves (I'm not aware 
of the latter at all). I'm very opposed to continuing doing it in 
Ironic, and I'm going to propose patch stopping gating Kilo changes 
(non-breaking obviously).

Hope that helps,
Dmitry

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