Open Stack

I ran into an issue in a review about moving environment resolution from 
client to server [1]. It revolves around clients being able to access 
older versions of servers (that's a pretty simplistic description; see 
[2] for the spec).

Before the holiday, Steve Hardy and I were talking about the 
complications involved. In my case, there's no good way to differentiate 
an older server from a legitimate error.

Since the API isn't versioned to the extent that we can leverage that 
value, I was looking into using the template versions call. Something 
along the lines of:

   supported_versions = hc.template_versions.list()
   version_nums = [i.to_dict()['version'].split('.')[1] for i in 
supported_versions]
   mitaka_or_newer = [i for i in version_nums if i >= '2016-04-08']

Yes, I'm planning on cleaning that up before submitting it :)

What I'm wondering is if I should make this into some sort of 
generalized utility method in the client, under the assumption that 
we'll need this sort of check in the future for the same backward 
compatibility requirements.

So a few questions:

1. Does anyone strongly disagree to checking supported template versions 
as a way of determining the specifics of the server API.

2. Does anything like this already exist that I can use?

3. If not, any suggestions on where I should put it? I see a 
heat.common.utils module but I'm not sure if there is a convention 
against that module (or common in general) making live server calls.

Thanks :D


[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/239504/
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/226157/