Open Stack

This was discussed in the nova meeting today [1] but I need to make 
everyone aware of it here too.

There will be no spec approvals for *new* things until after the summit.

We've been carrying a large backlog of specs/blueprints/priorities for 
several releases now and need to start flushing some of that out of the 
queue before taking on new debt.

So until after the summit (about the next 5 weeks), we're only 
re-approving previously approved specs from mitaka. We already have 21 
of those re-approved [2]. When you count specless blueprints, we already 
have 29 approved blueprints for newton [3]. Several of those are just 
mass cleanup efforts though.

This is our current list of open previously-approved specs [4]. I expect 
a few more to show up in there with glance v2 and volume multi-attach.

Anyway, the big point here is we have too much stuff in the backlog and 
we need to focus our attention at landing those things early in newton 
before adding more new specs to the backlog.

There might be some exceptional cases of things that were nearly 
approved but didn't land in mitaka due to nits, but have an obvious path 
to landing early in Newton - those can be discussed on a case-by-case 
basis (some of the scheduler work with resource providers and inventory 
falls into this category).

But for the most part, expect that new specs will not be approved (or 
reviewed really) until after the summit. People can still propose new 
specs, but don't expect them to get much attention right now.

As for what *new* things we'll approve after the summit or how long 
we'll have the window open for those, I don't know yet. We'll be 
discussing that at the summit. Part of it is going to depend on what we 
can get done in the next 4-5 weeks. I expect new specs related to 
existing priorities are going to get, well, priority.

"But what do I do while waiting for my spec to be approved?", you ask. 
Well, there are a few things:

* Help review the things that are approved so we can get the backlog to 
shrink, since that's the top issue right now.
* Help with bug triage (another huge backlog issue is unresolved bugs 
that need to be triaged again or potentially just closed now).
* Get POC code up for your spec.
* Help with some of the mass specless bp efforts, like config option 
cleanup, removing mox usage, etc.
* Help with some of the testing gap efforts, like live migration or 
latest libvirt+qemu.

I realize this isn't a popular stance, but the team really needs to 
focus on clearing out the backlog of things that we've said repeatedly, 
in some cases for several releases now, that we were going to make a 
priority and still haven't gotten done.

[1] 
http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/nova/2016/nova.2016-03-24-14.00.log.html
[2] http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/nova-specs/specs/newton/
[3] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/newton
[4] 
https://review.openstack.org/#/q/project:openstack/nova-specs+status:open+previously-approved

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Thanks,

Matt Riedemann