Open Stack

Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> wrote:
>On 2017-11-28 20:42:34 +0000 (+0000), Adam Spiers wrote:
>[...]
>> That said, it seems to be based on the assumption that all work is
>> associated with at least one project (i.e. git repo). Is there a
>> way to make it work for a SIG which has no corresponding git repo?
>
>This assumption isn't really baked into Storyboard, but rather our
>(OpenStack community infrastructure) setup automation. It's come up
>in the past that we should noodle on a solution for "repo-less"
>Storyboard project creation integrated with our present automation
>model, but the bikeshed^Wdesign discussions mostly break down at the
>point where we realize we need to pick some scheme for avoiding
>potential future name collisions with new Git repositories.

Ahh I see; yeah, that makes sense.  At risk of reawakening the
bike-shedding ...

My first thought was that you could potentially sidestep this problem
by not considering that a collision but instead declaring a "first
come first served" policy and dropping the requirement for the Git
repository to actually exist?

For example, let's say that I were to request a Storyboard project
called "openstack/openstack-self-healing", without actually creating
that Git repository.  Then if someone else came along and requested a
Git repo with the same name, the answer would be "sorry, that name's
already taken".

The downside of that approach is that some validation would need to be
added to automatically reject creation of Git repos which are named
the same as an existing Storyboard project.  That sounds like an ugly
boundary violation, but that could be solved by changing the approach
to require the repo to exist, even if it's empty and unused.

In any case, with good choices of names, the risk of collision seems
low.  For example, a better project name in this case might be
"openstack-sig/openstack-self-healing", or even
"openstack-sig/self-healing", and it's hard to imagine who else
outside the SIG would want a Git repo of the same name.  Although I
guess introducing a whole new top-level namespace prefix might entail
extra work which is undesirable.

>In prior cases, the need remained hypothetical once the projects in
>question realized they were interested in having at least one
>revision control space to track some basic documentation and other
>assorted artifacts. This may or may not be the case for the
>Self-Healing SIG, I have no idea.

Currently the wiki is probably good enough, but it certainly wouldn't
do any harm to have a Git repo, and it's not even unlikely that we
will need one in the future.

>It also bears mention that you don't need a project in Storyboard to
>be able to use it to create sharable worklists and boards, so long
>as your goal is to use them to track tasks which are associated with
>other repos/projects.

Thanks, good to know.  But in this case I envisage we'll want to track
some tasks which are not specific to other repos, e.g. "set up IRC
channel" (which is maybe a stupid example, since it's probably quicker
to just do it than have this discussion, but you get the point :-)