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On Thu, 2021-11-25 at 18:45 +0000, Stephen Finucane wrote:
> 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.

Reviving this thread. Since I posted about this, jichenjc has helpfully piped up
and noted that ZVM is very much alive and all the logic simply lives in a
separate library [1]. However, the pypowervm PR is still stalled and it seems no
one is monitoring this or cares. It also seems this is hindering multiple
projects [2]. [3] and [4] will mark the driver as deprecated and move
dependencies to 'extras' (meaning they're not installed by default). I suggest
we merge these sooner rather than later to signal to potential users that this
driver is not long for the world unless something changes.

Cheers,
Stephen

[1] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/819365
[2] https://github.com/powervm/pypowervm/pull/17#issuecomment-978122930
[3] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/819366
[4] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/822749

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