Open Stack

> Ok, to turn the question around, we (the cinder team) have recognised a
> definite and strong need to have somewhere for vendors to share patches on
> versions of Cinder older than the stable branch policy allows.
> 
> Given this need, what are our options?
> 
> 1. We could do all this outside Openstack infrastructure. There are
> significant downsides to doing so from organisational, maintenance, cost
> etc points of view. Also means that the place vendors go for these patches
> is not obvious, and the process for getting patches in is not standard.
And if some people have 2 or more different storages, they might need to 
run separate Cinder processes, because the vendors' stable tree diverge and 
cannot easily be merged again.

> 2. We could have something not named 'stable' that has looser rules than
> stable branches,, maybe just pep8 / unit / cinder in-tree tests. No
> devstack.
+1 from me.
Name it "long-term-driver-only-updates" or so ;)


> 3. We go with the Neutron model and take drivers out of tree. This is not
> something the cinder core team are in favour of - we see significant value
> in the code review that drivers currently get - the code quality
> improvements between when a driver is submitted and when it is merged are
> sometimes very significant. Also, taking the code out of tree makes it
> difficult to get all the drivers checked out in one place to analyse e.g.
> how a certain driver call is implemented across all the drivers, when
> reasoning or making changes to core code.
-1

> Given we've identified a clear need, and have repeated rejected one
> solution (take drivers out of tree - it has been discussed at every summit
> and midcycle for 3+ cycles), what positive suggestions can people make?
Number 2 - a centralized branch (ie. in openstack.org) that *only* takes 
driver updates (and doesn't need CI).
If a driver is broken, too bad for that vendor - must have been the last 
driver update, as the Cinder code didn't change since EOL...