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TL;DR keep globals.yml to a minimum, customise configs via 
host_vars/group_vars

It seems right now the "best" approach may be to tokenise variables as 
required. This is the approach we currently use in Oracle. There are two 
other approaches I can think of available to us:

1) The overwrite mechanism as Jeffrey mentioned
2) Make the merge_configs script modular so it can handle more formats 
than just ini

The problem with 1) is that it is heavy weight for the Operator who 
wants to just customise one or two variables such as WEBROOT. Now they 
have to copy and maintain the entire config file.

The problem with 2) is that I feel it's a burden on us to write and 
maintain code that can merge many different file formats. It could be 
done, though may potentially be outside the scope of the project.

The tokenisation approach is unfortunately against what is described in 
"Kolla’s Deployment Philosophy"[0] though the reality may be that this 
approach is the most Operator friendly. In regards to concern of 
globals.yml growing unmanageable, I feel globals.yml is overused and 
should only store the bare minimum. Service specific variables should be 
kept within their own role files (e.g. ansible/roles/horizon/defaults), 
and then documented which are available for tweaking via top level 
host_vars/group_vars. This is standard practice in other Ansible roles 
I've come across.

-Paul

[0] http://docs.openstack.org/developer/kolla/deployment-philosophy.html

On 04/05/16 16:28, Mauricio Lima wrote:
> I agree with your approach Jeffrey, although this is not ideal, this is
> an approach already used in kolla.
>
> 2016-05-04 12:01 GMT-03:00 Jeffrey Zhang <zhang.lei.fly at gmail.com
> <mailto:zhang.lei.fly at gmail.com>>:
>
>     Recently, Jack Ning pushed a PS[0], which export the `WEBROOT` to
>     the globals.yml file.
>     Because there is no chance to change the horizon/apache configure
>     file now.
>
>     The root cause is that: Kolla do not support non-ini format
>     configure file. for the
>     ini-format file, we use a merge_config module[1] to merge all the
>     found file. But it
>     will be not work for configure file for apache, rabbitmq and so on.
>
>     I would like to the current merge_config implementation. It is
>     directly and easy to use.
>     Not like the puppet, we have to remember the variable name defined
>     in the module. we have
>     no chance to add some user-defined variable.
>
>     Export the variable to global is very bad and ugly. It will became a
>     disaster when more
>     and more variables is exported.
>
>     So we should catch up a better solution to handle the configure file.
>
>     One solution I have is use overwrite mechanism. for example when
>     there is a file in
>     /etc/kolla/config/apache.conf, it will overwrite the templates in
>     the roles. But this
>     is still not ideal.
>
>     Any body has better solution?
>
>     [0] https://review.openstack.org/306928
>     [1]
>     http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/kolla/tree/ansible/action_plugins/merge_configs.py
>
>     --
>     Regards,
>     Jeffrey Zhang
>     Blog: http://xcodest.me <http://xcodest.me/>
>
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