Open Stack

On 04/02/2016 11:40, Sean Dague wrote:
> A few issues have crept up recently with the service catalog, API
> headers, API end points, and even similarly named resources in
> different resources (e.g. backup), that are all circling around a key
> problem. Distributed teams and naming collision.
>
> Every OpenStack project has a unique name by virtue of having a git
> tree. Once they claim 'openstack/foo', foo is theirs in the
> OpenStack universe for all time (or until trademarks say otherwise).
> Nova in OpenStack will always mean one project.
>
> There has also been a desire to replace project names with
> common/generic names, in the service catalog, API headers, and a few
> other places. Nova owns 'compute'. Except... that's only because we
> all know that it does. We don't *actually* have a registry for those
> values.
>
> So the code names are well regulated, the common names, that we
> encourage use of, are not. Devstack in tree code defines some
> conventions. However with the big tent, things get kind of squirely
> pretty quickly. Congress registering 'policy' as their endpoint type
> is a good example of that -
> https://github.com/openstack/congress/blob/master/devstack/plugin.sh#L147
>
>  Naming is hard. And trying to boil down complicated state machines
> to one or two word shiboliths means that inevitably we're going to
> find some words just keep cropping up: policy, flavor, backup, meter.
> We do however need to figure out a way forward.
>
> Lets start with the top level names (resource overlap cascades from
> there).
>
> What options do we have?
>
> 1) Use the names we already have: nova, glance, swift, etc.
>
> Upside, collision problem is solved. Downside, you need a secret
> decoder ring to figure out what project does what.
>
> 2) Have a registry of "common" names.
>
> Upside, we can safely use common names everywhere and not fear
> collision down the road.
>
> Downside, yet another contention point.
>
> A registry would clearly be under TC administration, though all the
> heavy lifting might be handed over to the API working group. I still
> imagine collision around some areas might be contentious.

++ to a central registry. It could easily be added to the projects.yaml
file, and is a single source of truth.

I imagine collisions are going to be contentious - but having a central
source makes finding potential collisions much easier.

>
> 3) Use either, inconsistently, hope for the best. (aka - status quo)
>
> Upside, no long mailing list thread to figure out the answer.
> Downside, it sucks.
>
>
> Are there other options missing? Where are people leaning at this
> point?
>
> Personally I'm way less partial to any particular answer as long as
> it's not #3.
>
>
> -Sean
>