Open Stack

I've had a PR open against the pypowervm library for over a fortnight now [1]
with no activity. This has prompted me to go looking into the state of the
powervm driver and what I've found isn't great. It doesn't seem there has been
any feature development on the driver for many years, and the last change I can
see that wasn't simply of a case of "I need to do this to get tests to pass" was
over three years ago [2]. The CI also doesn't appear to have been touched in
years.

The situation for zvm isn't any better. The last functional change to that
driver was nearly 2 years ago and I wasn't able to spot any CI running (though
it's possible I just missed this).

This means the powervm and zvm drivers stand out from the other non-libvirt
drivers in-tree, each of which are getting at least some activity (albeit out-
of-tree for Hyper-V, from what I recall). It also begs the question: are these
drivers something we want to keep around? If we do, how are we going to maintain
them long term? If not, how aggressive should we be in removing that now dead
code?

I'll open patches to mark both powervm and zvm as deprecated shortly so that,
assuming nothing changes in the interim, we can look to remove it early in the Z
cycle. Please respond here or on the reviews if you have concerns.

Stephen

[1] https://github.com/powervm/pypowervm/pull/17
[2] Change ID I89ad36f19672368a1f795e1f29c5af6368ccfeec