[openstack-dev] [Nova][Keystone] The unbearable lightness of specs

Nikola Đipanov ndipanov at redhat.com
Thu Jun 25 09:20:26 UTC 2015


On 06/24/2015 09:00 PM, Adam Young wrote:
> On 06/24/2015 12:25 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> Which happened repeatedly. You could say that
>> the first patch submitted to the code repository should simply be a doc
>> file addition, that describes the feature proposal and we should discuss
>> that before then submitting code patches, but then that's essentially
>> just the specs again, but with the spec doc in the main nova.git instead
>> of nova-specs.git.
> 
> Something like this, yes.   I do not like the fact that the spec and the
> code are likely to be out of sync, and that the target audience for the
> spec after the feature is implemented is vanishingly small. We should
> put the effort into docs that is currently going in to specs.
> 
> But, I stand by what I said before: Gerrit is not the right tool for
> design, and specs are correspondingly owned by one person.  I think it
> is the approval part that really bugs me; the pedantry is its defining
> feature.  These are details much better hashed out in the code itself.
> 
> Specs prevent code from being written.  If you think too much code is
> written, then, yes, you will like specs. If, on the other hand, you
> think that things should be implemented and tested before being posted
> to the central repo, then specs are not nearly as valuable as end user
> docs.  I think and design in Code, not in specs.  There are too many
> details that you don't discover until you actually write the code, and
> thus the specs often do not reflect the reality of the implementation
> anyway.
> 

I would add here that getting said "written and tested" code in the
hands of users is also extremely important, that's how you get the
information on where to go next, and how real bugs get found. You wanna
do that as soon as possible!

We heavily de-prioritize that with the specs process.

N.



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