Open Stack

On Mon, 23 May 2016, Gregory Haynes wrote:
>>>> Excerpts from Chris Dent's message of 2016-05-20 14:16:15 +0100:
>>>>> I don't think language does (or should) have anything to do with it.
>>>>>
>>>>> The question is whether or not the tool (whether service or
>>>>> dependent library) is useful to and usable outside the openstack-stack.
>>>>> For example gnocchi is useful to openstack but you can use it with other
>>>>> stuff, therefore _not_ openstack. More controversially: swift can be
>>>>> usefully used all by its lonesome: _not_ openstack.
>
> Making a tool which is useful outside of the OpenStack context just
> seems like good software engineering - it seems odd that we would try
> and ensure our tools do not fit this description. Fortunately, many (or
> even most) of the tools we create *are* useful outside of the OpenStack
> world - pbr, git-review, diskimage-builder, (I hope) many of the oslo
> libraries. This is really a question of defining useful interfaces more
> than anything else, not a statement of whether a tool is part of our
> community.

Defining what the community is is what we're trying to do here, yes?

Based on conversations I've had without people _outside_ the
community, those people think that OpenStack is a community building
a thing called OpenStack but they are universally confused about
what OpenStack _is_.

Despite the great usefulness of those things I'm pretty sure the
OpenStack those people are looking for is neither pbr, not git-review
nor diskimage-builder. Those tools are critical to the development
of OpenStack, our attention to them is critical. But now much to
they impact the definition of OpenStack?

So, yet another way to frame the original question (in a loaded way)
may be: Are we trying to come up with a way of defining the community
that lets us carry on doing what we've been doing, haphazardly, or
are we trying to get the process of defining the community to bring
us to a point where we have some useful constraints that allow us to
more effectively reach goal X?

Begging, of course: What's X?

(To me, an unfettered big tent is a great way to keep riding the
great OpenStack enterprise boondoggle, but I'm not sure it's
resulting in a great experience for humans who aren't on that
train.)

-- 
Chris Dent               (╯°□°)╯︵┻━┻            http://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent