[openstack-dev] [tc][fuel] Making Fuel a hosted project

Doug Hellmann doug at doughellmann.com
Thu Jun 15 12:56:19 UTC 2017


Excerpts from Thierry Carrez's message of 2017-06-15 10:48:21 +0200:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Part of reducing OpenStack perceived complexity is to cull projects that
> have not delivered on their initial promises. Those are always difficult
> discussions, but we need to have them. In this email I'd like to discuss
> whether we should no longer consider Fuel an official OpenStack project,
> and turn it into a hosted (unofficial) project.
> 
> Fuel originated at Mirantis as their OpenStack installer. It was
> proposed as an official OpenStack project in July 2015 and approved in
> November 2015. The promise at that time was that making it official
> would drive other organizations to participate in its development and
> turn it into the one generic OpenStack installer that everyone wanted.
> Fuel was not a small endeavor: in Mitaka and Newton it represented more
> commits than Nova.
> 
> The Fuel team fully embraced open collaboration, but failed to attract
> other organizations. Mitaka and Newton were still 96% the work of
> Mirantis. In my view, while deployment/packaging tools sit at the
> periphery of the "OpenStack" map, they make sense as official OpenStack
> teams if they create an open collaboration playing field and attract
> multiple organizations. Otherwise they are just another opinionated
> install tool that happens to be blessed with an "official" label.
> 
> Since October 2016, Fuel's activity has dropped, following the gradual
> disengagement of its main sponsor. Comparing activity in the 5 first
> months of the year, there was a 68% drop between 2016 and 2017, the
> largest of any official OpenStack project. The Fuel team hasn't met on
> IRC for the last 3 months. Activity dropped from ~990 commits/month (Apr
> 2016, Aug 2016) to 52 commits in April 2017 and 25 commits in May 2017.
> And there are unsolved issues around licensing that have been lingering
> for the last 6 months.
> 
> I think that, despite the efforts of the Fuel team, Fuel did not become
> what we hoped when we made it official: a universal installer that would
> be used across the board. It was worth a try, I'm happy that we tried,
> but I think it's time to stop considering it a part of "OpenStack"
> proper and make it a hosted project. It can of course continue its
> existence as an unofficial project hosted on OpenStack infrastructure.
> 
> Thoughts ?
> 

IIRC, they are hosting their release artifacts on a Mirantis server,
too. I agree, the project was never fully "upstreamed" in the way we
hoped.

+1 for changing the project status.

Doug



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