Open Stack

Hey everybody!

This isn't the most normal thing I've done, but whatever.

We've got this great library, shade, which people love to use to 
interact with their OpenStack clouds (even when they don't know they're 
using it, like when they're using Ansible) - and which we use in Infra 
behind nodepool to get test nodes for everyone's test jobs.

Unfortunately, we have a somewhat ludicrously small contributor base 
right now (primarily me) Now, I'm pretty darned good and can produce a 
constant stream of patches - so you might not _think_ there's not a ton 
of developers, but I am, in the end, only one person, and that's not 
great. Shrews has been the other primary developer, but he's been 
focusing his attention on zuulv3 (which is a very good thing)

In any case - I'd love some more folks to come in and do some things - 
and maybe none of you knew we were looking for new people! So come have 
fun with us! We have an IRC channel: #openstack-shade - and bugs are 
tracked in Storyboard (https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project/760)

There is a worklist for bugs that have been triaged as important - that 
is, there is a clearly broken behavior out in production for someone:

   https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/worklist/194

The most important project (that's not terrible to get started on) is 
one I'm calling "restification" - which is that we're replacing our use 
of python-*client with making direct REST calls via keystoneauth. This 
is important so that we can ensure that we're supporting backwards 
compat for our users, while maintaining co-installability with OpenStack 
releases.

   https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/worklist/195

The process is as follows:

- Pick a call or calls to migrate
- Make a patch changing the unittests to use requests-mock instead of 
mocking the client object (this changes the test to validate the HTTP 
calls we're making, but shows that using the currently known to be 
working client calls)
- Make a patch that replaces the submit_task call in 
shade/openstackclient.py (and removes the Task class from 
shade/_tasks.py) with a rest call using the appropriate 
self._{servicename}_client - this should not change any unit tests - 
that shows that the new call does the same things as the old call.

Once you get the hang of it, it's fun - and it's a fun way to learn a 
ton about OpenStack's REST APIs.

After that's done, we have some deeper tasks that need done related to 
caching and client-side rate limiting (we support these already, but we 
need to support them the same way everywhere) - and we have a whole 
mult-cloud/multi-threaded facade class to write that should be a ton of 
fun - but we need to finish restification before we do a ton of new things.

If you want to start hacking with us - I recommend coming in and saying 
hi before you dive in to huge restification patches - and also start 
small - do one call and figure out the flow - going off and doing 
multi-day patches often leads to pain and suffering.

Anyway - I hope some of you think interop client libraries are fun like 
I do - and would love to have you play with us!

Thanks!
Monty