openstack team mailing list archive

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@xxxxxxxx>]

On 13/06/2012, at 1:24 PM, Gabriel Hurley wrote:

> Totally agree with all of Jay's points, and I also couldn't agree more with Mark on the importance of being crystal clear, and not operating on just a "common understanding" which is quickly misunderstood or forgotten.
> 
> Ideally I'd like to see an OpenStack API feature contract of some sort... essentially a document describing the FULL list of features, how those parameters are controlled and how they would interact, and what a project should do if they do not implement an API feature (hopefully only for technical reasons such as Keystone paging with LDAP or swift with complex DB-esque operations). This isn't saying we should have a unified API spec, I'm talking solely about a contract for the features all APIs should strive to support.
> 
> This would be a big project, but everyone would then have a common agreement about what the user experience of interacting with OpenStack should be. The project APIs as they stand are siloed and stunningly inconsistent, and I'd love to work toward fixing that.

Absolutely. 

One of my other projects is to rewrite the API as a proper specification (in a style similar to an Internet-Draft, not that we'd necessarily publish it as one).

I should have something to show soon; if you're interested in helping out, that'd be great.

Cheers,


> My two cents,
> 
>    - Gabriel
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: openstack-bounces+gabriel.hurley=nebula.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> [mailto:openstack-
>> bounces+gabriel.hurley=nebula.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
>> Mark Nottingham
>> Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 7:20 PM
>> To: Jay Pipes
>> Cc: openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: Re: [Openstack] [keystone] v3 API draft (update and questions to
>> the community)
>> 
>> 
>> On 13/06/2012, at 3:31 AM, Jay Pipes wrote:
>> 
>>> This isn't necessarily true. Nova's compute layer goes through a number of
>> steps to ensure a semi-transactional nature to certain operations like
>> resizing. Certain times a query needs to indicate that it intends to make a
>> reservation of resources (see quota/reservation system now .. this is the
>> SELECT FOR UPDATE paradigm) and other times, the query doesn't care
>> about such things. In the latter case, there aren't expectations that the list
>> returned is 100% accurate according to the state of the database at a
>> particular timestamp of when the transaction occurred. In this case, filters
>> and optimistic pagination works perfectly fine, IMHO.
>> 
>> That might work, but we need to be crystal-clear about the semantics of
>> what we're giving back; having it understood between OpenStack projects
>> isn't good enough.
>> 
>> I.e., we're not building the APIs just for Horizon; they're for lots of folks, and
>> subtle semantics -- even when well-documented, much less when they're
>> not -- are often misunderstood.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> --
>> Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/