Open Stack

On Sun, May 1, 2016 at 5:03 PM, Steven Dake (stdake) <stdake at cisco.com> wrote:
> I don't think a separate repository is the correct approach based upon one
> off private conversations with folks at summit. Many people from that list
> approached me and indicated they would like to see the work integrated in
> one repository as outlined in my vote proposal email.  The reasons I heard
> were:
>
> Better integration of the community
> Better integration of the code base
> Doesn't present an us vs them mentality that one could argue happened during
> kolla-mesos
> A second repository makes k8s a second class citizen deployment architecture
> without a voice in the full deployment methodology
> Two gating methods versus one
> No going back to a unified repository while preserving git history
>
> I favor of the separate repositories I heard
>
> It presents a unified workspace for kubernetes alone
> Packaging without ansible is simpler as the ansible directory need not be
> deleted
>
> There were other complaints but not many pros.  Unfortunately I failed to
> communicate these complaints to the core team prior to the vote, so now is
> the time for fixing that.

I favor the repository split, but the reason being is that I think
Ansible along with Kubernetes should each be a separate repository.
Keeping a monolithic repository is the opposite of the "Unix
philosophy". It was even recommended at one point to split every
single service into a separate repository [1].

Repository management, backports, and additional gating are all things
that I'll admit are more work with more than one single repository.
However, the ease of ramping up where everything is separated out
makes it worth it in my opinion. I believe the success of a given
community is partially due to proper delineation of expertise
(otherwise, why not put all OpenStack services in one gigantic repo?).
I'm echoing this comment somebody said at the summit: stretching the
core team across every orchestration tool is not scalable. I'm really
hoping more projects will grow around the Kolla ecosystem and can do
so without being required to become proficient with every other
orchestration system.

One argument for keeping a single repository is to compare to the
mesos effort (that has stopped now) in a different repository. But as
it has already been said, mesos should have been given fairness with
ansible split out as well. If everything were in a single repository,
it has been suggested that the community will review more. However, I
don't personally believe that with gerrit in use that affects things
at all. OpenStack even has a gerrit dashboard creator [2], but I think
developers are capable enough at easily finding what they want to
consistently review.

As I said in a previous reply [3], I don't think git history should
affect this decision as we can make it work in either scenario. ACL
permissions seem overly complicated to be in the same repository, even
if we can arrange for a feature branch to have different permissions
from the main repo.

My views here are definitely focused on the long term view. If any
short term plans can be made to allow ourselves to eventually align
with having separate repositories, I don't think I'd have a problem
with that. However, I thought the Ansible code was supposed to have
been separated out a long time ago. This is a natural inflection point
to change policy and mode of operating, which is why I don't enjoy the
idea of waiting any longer. Luckily, having Ansible in the same
repository currently does not inhibit any momentum with Kubernetes in
a separate repository.

As far as starting the repositories split and then merging them in the
future (assuming Ansible also stays in one repo), I don't know why we
would want that. But perhaps after the Kubernetes effort has
progressed we can better determine if that makes sense with a clear
view of what the project files actually end up looking like. I don't
think that any project that changes the containers' ABI is suitable to
be labeled as "Kolla", so there wouldn't be any dockerfiles part of
the repository.

[1] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-April/093213.html
[2] https://github.com/openstack/gerrit-dash-creator
[3] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-May/093645.html