Open Stack

Greetings OpenStack community,

In today's meeting [0] after briefly covering old business we spent nearly 50 minutes going round in circles discussing the complex interactions of expectations of API stability, the need to fix bugs and the costs and benefits of microversions. We didn't make a lot of progress on the general issues, but we did #agree that a glance issue [4] should be treated as a code bug (not a documentation bug) that should be fixed. In some ways this position is not aligned with the ideal presented by stability guidelines but it is aligned with an original goal of the API-WG: consistency. It's unclear how to resolve this conflict, either in this specific instance or in the guidelines that the API-WG creates. As stated in response to one of the related reviews [5]: "If bugs like this don't get fixed properly in the code, OpenStack risks going down the path of Internet Explorer and people wind up writing client code to the bugs and that way lies madness."

One reminder: Projects should make sure that their liaison information is up to date at http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/api-wg/liaisons.html . If not, please provide a patch to doc/source/liaisons.json to update it.

Three guidelines were merged. None were frozen. Four are being worked on. See below.

# Newly Published Guidelines

* Add guideline for invalid query parameters
   https://review.openstack.org/#/c/417441/
* Add guidelines on usage of state vs. status
   https://review.openstack.org/#/c/411528/
* Clarify the status values in versions
   https://review.openstack.org/#/c/411849/

# API Guidelines Proposed for Freeze

Guidelines that are ready for wider review by the whole community.

Nothing newly frozen.

# Guidelines Currently Under Review [3]

* Add guidelines for boolean names
   https://review.openstack.org/#/c/411529/

* Define pagination guidelines
   https://review.openstack.org/#/c/390973/

* Add API capabilities discovery guideline
   https://review.openstack.org/#/c/386555/

* [WIP] Refactor and re-validate api change guidelines
   https://review.openstack.org/#/c/421846/

# Highlighting your API impacting issues

If you seek further review and insight from the API WG, please address your concerns in an email to the OpenStack developer mailing list[1] with the tag "[api]" in the subject. In your email, you should include any relevant reviews, links, and comments to help guide the discussion of the specific challenge you are facing.

To learn more about the API WG mission and the work we do, see OpenStack API Working Group [2].

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

# References

[0] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/api_wg/2017/api_wg.2017-02-02-16.00.html
[1] http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
[2] http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/api-wg/
[3] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+project:openstack/api-wg,n,z
[4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/glance/+bug/1656183
[5] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/425487/

Meeting Agenda
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/API-WG#Agenda
Past Meeting Records
http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/api_wg/
Open Bugs
https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack-api-wg

-- 
Chris Dent                 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯           https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent