Open Stack

Hello Paul,

thank you very much for your contribution - it is very appreciated.

You addressed a topic with your patch set that was IMHO not in a wide
focus: generating images for containers.  The ideas in the patches are
good and should be implemented.

Nevertheless I'm missing the concept behind your patches. What I saw
are a couple of (independent?) patches - and it looks that there is
one 'big goal' - but I did not really get it.  My proposal is (as it
is done for other bigger changes or introducing new concepts) that
you write a spec for this first [1].  That would help other people
(see e.g. Matthew) to use the same blueprint also for other
distributions.
One possibility would be to classify different element sets and define
the dependency between them.  E.g. to have a element class 'container'
which can be referenced by other classes, but is not able to reference
these (e.g. VM or hardware specific things).

There are additional two major points:

* IMHO you addressed only some elements that needs adaptions to be
  able to used in containers.  One element I stumbled over yesterday
  is the base element: it is always included until you explicitly
  exclude it.  This base element depends on a complete init-system -
  which is for a container unneeded overhead. [2]

* Your patches add a lot complexity and code duplication.
  This is not the way it should be (see [3], p 110, p 345).
  One reason is, that you do everything twice: once for Debian and
  once for Ubuntu - and both in a (slightly) different way.
  Please: factor out common code.
  Please: improve code as you touch it.

And three minor:

* Release notes are missing (reno is your friend)

* Please do not introduce code which 'later on' can / should / will be
  cleaned up.  Do it correct right from the beginning. [4]

* It looks that this is a bigger patch set - so maybe we should
  include it in v2?

Kind regards

Andre


[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/414728/
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/417310/
[3] "Refactoring - Improving the Design of Existing Code", Martin
    Fowler, Addison Wesley, Boston, 2011
[4] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/414728/8/elements/debootstrap-minimal/root.d/99-clean-up-cache
[5] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/413221/