Open Stack

Hi all,

I'd like to revisit our policy of not templating everything in 
kolla-ansible's template files. This is a policy that was set in place 
very early on in kolla-ansible's development, but I'm concerned we 
haven't been very consistent with it. This leads to confusion for 
contributors and operators - "should I template this and submit a patch, 
or do I need to start using my own config files?".

The docs[0] are currently clear:

"The Kolla upstream community does not want to place key/value pairs in 
the Ansible playbook configuration options that are not essential to 
obtaining a functional deployment."

In practice though our templates contain many options that are not 
necessary, and plenty of patches have merged that while very useful to 
operators, are not necessary to an 'out of the box' deployment.

So I'd like us to revisit the questions:

1) Is kolla-ansible attempting to be a 'batteries included' tool, which 
caters to operators via key/value config options?

2) Or, is it to be a solid reference implementation, where any degree of 
customisation implies a clear 'bring your own configs' type policy.

If 1), then we should potentially:

* Update ours docs to remove the referenced paragraph
* Look at reorganising files like globals.yml into something more 
maintainable.

If 2),

* We should make it clear to reviewers that patches templating options 
that are non essential should not be accepted.
* Encourage patches to strip down existing config files to an absolute 
minimum.
* Make this policy more clear in docs / templates to avoid frustration 
on the part of operators.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
-Paul

[0] 
https://docs.openstack.org/kolla-ansible/latest/admin/deployment-philosophy.html#why-not-template-customization