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[Vishvananda Ishaya <vishvananda@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Everyone,

We are in the unfortunate position of not knowing how good our OpenStack API XML support is. All of our integration tests use json. Many of the compute extensions don't even have XML deserializers. We also assume that there bugs we don't even know about due to underuse. We need to do something about XML by Folsom, because releasing a buggy api isn't good for anyone.

We don't want to alienate the communtity by dropping XML support, but we also can't recommend it in its current state. If there are people out there who use XML (or want to use XML) we need your help. We need help identifying what works and what doesn't, we need bug reports, and we need merge proposals for the extra serializers and fixes that are important. Nova-core has too much going on right now to tackle XML.

I see a few potential results from this effort.

1) We get a lot of community support and we manage to get XML into usable shape by Folsom.

2) We get enough community support to get the core api working and the most important extensions in place. We release clear documentation on what is expected to work.

3) We get no support, in which case we mark XML support deprecated and encourage people to use JSON only.

Note that other openstack projects only support json, and there are already java bindings that use json so option 3) isn't terrible, but we don't want to go that route without discussing it with the community first. If anyone has alternative solutions or suggestions, feel free to let me know.

Thanks,
Vish