[Openstack-operators] [ops][tags][packaging] [tc] ops:packaging tag - a little common sense, please

Britt Houser (bhouser) bhouser at cisco.com
Wed Jun 10 20:48:07 UTC 2015


+1 the entire brainstorm session on what they should be called besides tags is rather demeaning.  There is obvious disagreement between what the TC wants to implement and what the ops folks want to implement.  Discussions that stoop to this level increase the divide instead of shrinking it.  Please lets raise the bar of the TC discussions.

Thx,
britt

From: Maish Saidel-Keesing <maishsk at maishsk.com<mailto:maishsk at maishsk.com>>
Reply-To: "maishsk+openstack at maishsk.com<mailto:maishsk+openstack at maishsk.com>" <maishsk+openstack at maishsk.com<mailto:maishsk+openstack at maishsk.com>>
Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2015 at 4:06 PM
To: Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com<mailto:jaypipes at gmail.com>>, "openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org>" <openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org>>, "openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>" <openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>>
Subject: Re: [Openstack-operators] [ops][tags][packaging] [tc] ops:packaging tag - a little common sense, please

Forgive the top posting.

Thank you Jay for your clarification and apology.

I wrote the piece below **before** you sent out your email this afternoon, so again this is nothing personal and not targeted at any **specific** person.

With that said, I still think that what I have to say is still relevant (if I am raked over the coals for it, then so be it), and should be voiced here on both of these lists, and is quoted here below in full.

----
Hello all.

I would like to bring to your attention the following log from last nights TC meeting [1] (if you have not already gone through it)

Starting at
20:17:42 <ttx> #topic Discuss differences between Ops and TC "tags"

Ending at
20:27:13 <ttx> #topic Add the Searchlight Project

With some highlights

20:19:47 <-----> ---: they are also setting themselves up for failure, IMHO, and a situation where the data will be almost immediately stale and worse than in the openstack.org wiki.
20:21:37 <------> what ops want is not so much tags as more targeted analytics data (extension to bitergia/stackalytics) by the sounds of it
20:22:45 <-----> I prefer 1/ really, but I'm more than happy to let their current strategy fail and then revisit.
20:24:42 <------> ------: I have *already* engaged with them. and their answer has been "f off, we'll do it our way".
20:25:46 * -------- looks forward to the ops:packaged:centos:call-me-maybe:ok-with-cern-this-week "tag"

(in order to not single out any single person from the meeting last night I have removed the names from the snippet - the originals are in the raw log).

Personally I find some of the comments highly condescending, and in some cases blatantly a pure insult.
It could be that some of it was supposed to be humorous, was said in the 'spur of the moment', but I think it is appropriate to remind people that all of these things are logged, and available for eternity.

If that is the way that certain members of the TC would like treat an initiative that was not born purely as a part of the developer community, but as part of the other side of the fence then I am sorry but this is destined to fail. Before it even starts.

Yes some of the comments are true, there are things to fix, but instead of going down the route of "we know better, because we know OpenStack and we have been here for 10 cycles already, so let us let them stew in their own juice and not help them out", they could be more receptive and embrace change and live up to their motto of being more inclusive.

If this attitude continues we will find ourselves after another cycle or two (or ten), and the community (and the TC) will still not have proper input from what they deem to be an 'important' factor in the community.

It seems to me that the operations aspect of OpenStack is of no interest to them - unless it is done their way and their way only.

To me this is classic case of typical OpenStack - That way is no good, I have a better way of doing it.

A large number of bytes were spilled during the TC elections of why Operators feel excluded from the OpenStack community.

For me, the interaction in the meeting above, is a perfect example of why.

As was voiced already on the mailing list lately [2]
" Not cool .....! Not even a little bit."

***Again I would like to stress this is not a personal attack on any single member of the TC - but a general feeling *I have* of the wrong attitude that is coming across from the people that are supposed to be representing and leading the WHOLE OpenStack community.***

I would appreciate your thoughts and comments.

[1] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2015/tc.2015-06-09-20.01.log.txt
[2] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-June/066031.html
--

On 06/10/15 20:51, Jay Pipes wrote:
Cross-posting to -operators and -dev because this involves *packagers* of OpenStack, as well as operators who use those packages.

Hello Operators,

First, let me start out by saying if you were offended by my snarky comments at yesterday's TC meeting [1] regarding the direction of the Ops Tags Team, I apologize. Sometimes I am snarky and/or moody, especially when I feel strongly about something, as is the case here. Please accept my apologies. Let's move on.

= tl;dr =

* The proposed things are not tags
* Operators should not be curating packaging tags (packagers should)
* Tags should not have a "value" component
* Packaging tags should be release-specific, or they will be wrong

= The details =

OK, that said, here are the issues I have with the proposed ops:packaging tags [2].

= The proposed things are not "tags" =

The things being proposed by the Ops Tags Team are in fact not "tags", which are simple strings of binary information that have a well-defined and singular meaning.

What the Ops Tags Team has proposed is structured, schema-full data objects. There is nothing wrong with having a structured object for purposes of generating useful information. But please don't call these things "tags", because they aren't.

Before I move on to other issues, I'd like to point out that the more you go down the route of adding more and more attributes, most of which would be optional, to these structured documents, the more you will run into a problem of having stale and misleading data contained in these JSON files. And that will lead to a worse user experience for operators than the current wiki, which, like all wikis, is notoriously out-of-date in many places.

A tag should mean one thing, and one thing only, to encourage clarity. The definition of the tag should be decisive regarding why a particular project has been tagged with that tag.

= Operators should not be curating packaging tags =

*Packagers* should be curating tags that correspond to whether or not packages exist for particular projects in OpenStack. Operators consume these packages, for sure, but the packagers in the upstream operating system communities are the ones that know the most accurate information about the state of packaging for a particular project and a particular release.

I strongly believe that these ops:packaged tags should really just be tags in the openstack/governance repository (i.e. regular TC tags) and be curated by the packaging community, which means they would not have the "ops:" prefix on them.

= Remove "value" component from the "tag" =

The current proposal for both ops:packaged and ops:production-use [3] tag definitions include a "value" component. For example, the ops:packaged tags must include one of the following "values":

 - good
 - beginning
 - warning
 - no

With each of the above values attempting to indicate to the audience that the packages for a particular project are in varying states of repair and "bug-freeness". There are a number of problems with including this "value" in the tag:

1) This value judgement about the packaging quality is ripe for getting out-of-date VERY quickly. Who is going to continually update the value parts for the different projects? Things change very quickly in packaging-land. Bugs are fixed, new packages built and published. Who in the ops community is going to track this? Please see point above about "Operators should not be curating packaging tags".

2) All software, including packages, has bugs. This is something that the Ops community just needs to accept and get over. Quabbling with each other about what constitutes a "major" bug in packaging and how many "major" bugs bugs constitute a "warning" value is less than useful to the audience here. Instead, the ops community should focus on providing useful documentation and links to the audience, in the form of long-form release notes or opinions about packages and documentation on the OpenStack wiki.

= Packaging tags should be release-specific, or they will be wrong =

For these packaging tags, the release must be part of the tag itself, otherwise the information it denotes would be indeterminate.

As an example, suppose you have a tag that looks like this:

 ops:packaged:centos:good

And in the tag definition you say that the tag is applied to projects that have CentOS RPM packages available "within the last 6 months". Well, as you all know, packages are published for a *particular release of OpenStack*. So, if Nova is tagged with ops:packaged:centos:good in, say, August 2015, the tag would ostensibly be saying that packages exist for Nova in Kilo. However, once November rolls around, and packages for Liberty don't (yet) exist, are you going to remove this "ops:packaged:centos:good" tag from Nova or (worse) change it to "ops:pacakged:centos:no"?

Instead, have the tag be specific to a release of OpenStack:

packaged:centos:kilo

= In summary =

In short, I would love it if the Ops Tags team would stick with binary tag definitions -- a tag should mean one thing and one thing only.

I don't believe the Ops Tags team should be curating the packaging tags -- the packaging community should do that, and do that under the main openstack/governance repository.

Packagers, I would love it if you would curate a set of tags that looks kind of like this:

 - packaged:centos:kilo
 - packaged:ubuntu:liberty
 - packaged:sles:juno

I will be proposing the above tag definition to the openstack/governance repository this week.

Thanks for listening,
-jay

[1] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irclogs/%23openstack-meeting/%23openstack-meeting.2015-06-09.log.html#t2015-06-09T20:18:00
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/186633
[3] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/189168

--
Maish Saidel-Keesing
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