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I was out when much of this conversation happened, so I'm going to
summarize my opinion here.

> So from a code perspective _placement_ is completely agnostic to
> whether a trait is "PCI_ADDRESS_01_AB_23_CD", "STORAGE_DISK_SSD", or
> "JAY_LIKES_CRUNCHIE_BARS".
>
> However, things which are using traits (e.g., nova, ironic) need to
> make their own decisions about how the value of traits are
> interpreted. I don't have a strong position on that except to say
> that _if_ we end up in a position of there being lots of traits
> willy nilly, people who have chosen to do that need to know that the
> contract presented by traits right now (present or not present, no
> value comprehension) is fixed.

I agree with what Chris holds sacred here, which is that placement
shouldn't ever care about what the trait names are or what they mean to
someone else. That also extends to me hoping we never implement a
generic key=value store on resource providers in placement.

>> I *do* see a problem with it, based on my experience in Nova where
>> this kind of thing leads to ugly, unmaintainable, and
>> incomprehensible code as I have pointed to in previous responses.

I definitely agree with what Jay holds sacred here, which is that
abusing the data model to encode key=value information into single trait
strings is bad (which is what you're doing with something like
PCI_ADDRESS_01_AB_23_CD).

I don't want placement (the code) to try to put any technical
restrictions on the meaning of trait names, in an attempt to try to
prevent the above abuse. I agree that means people _can_ abuse it if
they wish, which I think is Chris' point. However, I think it _is_
important for the placement team (the people) to care about how
consumers (nova, etc) use traits, and thus provide guidance on that is
necessary. Not everyone will follow that guidance, but we should provide
it. Projects with history-revering developers on both sides of the fence
can help this effort if they lead by example.

If everyone goes off and implements their way around the perceived
restriction of not being able to ask placement for RAID_LEVEL>=5, we're
going to have a much larger mess than the steaming pile of extra specs
in nova that we're trying to avoid.

--Dan