openstack-poc team mailing list archive

[Thierry Carrez <thierry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Monty Taylor wrote:
> My concern is that if we move forward using the suggested workarounds,
> we will be losing functionality/state information that we currently
> have. While this is not functionality that is important to the
> developers who have thusfar expressed an opinion - and I do appreciate
> that it's frustrating to be blocked on something that seems unimportant
> due to personal lack of use - it is important to those of us, like ttx
> and myself, who deal with the project from a slightly different perspective.
> 
> However, the data structure behind the pull request when accessed over
> the REST API does contain a field that ostensibly could be used to track
> something like this - and thus why I've been asking since the ODS to be
> introducted to someone at github so that we can chat about solutions.

I also think we should all be aware we'll lose some visibility over the
project plans and developed features. Let me explain:

For the information of the community at large, it's the responsibility
of PTLs to provide clear public plans for the development cycle, and
retrospectively provide a list of what was implemented in a given
milestone or release. So far I've been assisting them (in particular for
Nova) in providing that information, using clearly-accessible tools that
Launchpad provides, such as:

General plan for Diablo:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/diablo

Milestone-specific plan:
https://launchpad.net/nova/+milestone/diablo-2

Release contents:
https://launchpad.net/nova/diablo/diablo-1

Luckily, since our plan at this point is only to move code hosting to
GitHub, we won't lose those very useful reports. However, losing branch
links in bugs and blueprints will make it even more difficult to keep
those up to date. I currently use tools to spot the non-updated stuff
(blueprints with merged branches that are not set to "Implemented", or
bugs with merged branches that did not use "bzr commit --fixes lp:XXXX"
to automatically set "FixCommitted"), so I can keep everything
relatively up-to-date. But without API-queryable branch links, those
tools won't work, so we'll have to rely exclusively on developer
updates, or some external rule (like standardized fork names that match
blueprint names or bug numbers ?).

I understand that for smaller teams like Glance or Swift, keeping
everything up-to-date is not that much of an effort, but for Nova it is
already difficult and has taken a lot of my time. Since this is
theoretically the PTL's job (and with more projects coming up in
incubation/core) I don't intend to spend more time on this than I
currently do, so I fear the net result of losing integration will be (1)
more work on the PTLs or (2) less visibility on the development plans
and the delivered features.

Since we (read "PPB") want quite the opposite result (less work and more
visibility), I think that cost is to be compared to the net gain of
migrating to GitHub, especially for the larger projects like Nova.

Any suggestion on how to mitigate this ?
Vish: what are your thoughts on the matter ?

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Release Manager, OpenStack