Open Stack

On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 03:21:30AM -0400, Lance Haig wrote:
>    Good to know that there is interest.

Thanks for starting this effort - I agree it would be great to see the
example templates we provide improved and over time become better
references for heat features (as well as being more well tested).

>    I was thinking that we should perhaps create a directory for each
>    openstack version.

I'm personally not keen on this - Heat should handle old HOT versions in a
backwards compatible way, and we can use the template version (which
supports using the release name in recent heat versions) to document the
required version e.g if demonstrating some new resource or function.

FWIW we did already try something similar in the early days of heat, where
we had duplicate wordpress examples for different releases (operating
systems not OpenStack versions but it's the same problem).  We found that
old versions quickly became unmaintained, and ultimately got broken anyway
due to changes unrelated to Heat or OpenStack versions.

>    so we start say with a mitaka directory and then move the files there and
>    test them all so that they work with Liberty.
>    Then we can copy it over to Mitaka and do the same but add the extra
>    functionality.

While some manual testing each release is better than nothing, honestly I
feel like CI testing some (or ideally all) examples is the only way to
ensure they're not broken.  Clearly that's going to be more work initially,
but it'd be worth considering I think.

To make this simple for template authors, we could perhaps just create the
template with the default parameters, and codify some special place to
define the expected ouput values (we could for example have a special
expected_output parameter which the CI test consumes and compares after the
stack create completes).

>    and then Newton etc...
>    That way if someone is on a specific version they only have to go to a
>    specific directory to get the examples they need.

As mentioned above, I think just using the template version should be
enough - we could even generate some docs using this to highlight example
templates that are specific to a release?

Steve