Oslo

The Oslo team held its second virtual PTG this week. We had a number of good discussions and even ran slightly over the 2 hours we scheduled, so I think it was a successful event. The first hour was mostly topics relating to Oslo itself, while the second hour was set aside for some cross-project discussions with the Nova team. Read on for details of both hours.

Despite my trepidation about the trip (some of it well-founded!), I made it to Shanghai and back for the Open Infrastructure Summit and Project Teams Gathering. I even managed to get some work done while I was there. :-)

First, I recommend reading the opening of Colleen Murphy's blog post about the event (and the rest of it too, if you have any interest in what Keystone is up to). It does an excellent job of describing the week at a high level. To summarize in my own words, the energy of this event was a little off. Many regular contributors were not present because of the travel situation and there was less engagement from local contributors than I would have hoped for. However, that doesn't mean nothing good came out of it!

In fact, it was a surprisingly active week for Oslo, especially given that only myself and two other cores were there and we had limited discussion within the team. It turns out Oslo was a popular topic of conversation in various Forum sessions, particularly oslo.messaging. This led to some good conversation at the PTG and a proposal for a new Oslo library. Not only were both Oslo summit sessions well attended, but good questions were asked in both so people weren't just there waiting for the next talk. ;-) In fact, I went 10 minutes over time on the project update (oops!), in part because I hadn't really planned time for questions since I've never gotten any in the past. Not complaining though.

Read on for more detail about all of this.

Just back from the Denver Summit and PTG, so here are my thoughts about the Summit. I expect to post my PTG wrapup to the openstack-discuss mailing list since it's more developer-specific.

I recently helped track down a bug exposed by a recent oslo.privsep release that added threading to allow parallel privileged calls. It was a segfault happening in the privsep daemon that was caused by a C call in a privileged Neutron module. This, as you might expect, was a little tricky to debug so I thought I'd document the process for posterity.

Since there was only one Oslo session and a couple of Designate sessions that I was able to attend, this update is going to be a bit of a grab-bag of topics. Hopefully I have some interesting thoughts on them. :-)

This is an announcement that we recently merged a new feature to oslo.config for validating the contents of config files. This has been an oft-requested feature, but in the past it was difficult to implement because config opts are registered dynamically at runtime and there's no good way to know for sure when all of them are present.

This was the first repeat OpenStack Summit location for me. While there have been repeat locations in the past, I wasn't at the first Summit at any of those locations. I think that means I'm getting old. :-)

There was a lot that had changed, and also a lot that stayed the same. The Vancouver Convention Center is still a fantastic venue, with plenty of space for sessions. And although I did attend all of the Oslo sessions, just like last time, we didn't over-schedule Oslo this time so I had a chance to attend some non-Oslo sessions as well. Since I'm also focusing on Designate these days, I made sure to catch all of those sessions, even the one at 5:30 PM on Thursday when everyone was a bit tired and ready to leave. And it was good - there was useful information in that presentation. I felt more productive at this Summit than last time, which is certainly a good thing.

With the intro out of the way, let's get down to the nuts and bolts of the sessions I attended.

This is going to be a bit of a different summit recap than my previous ones. Since Steve Hardy has already posted an excellent summary of the major TripleO topics from this summit, I'm not going to duplicate all of that here.

Instead, this will be a more personally focused post, wherein I reflect on my experience at this summit and how it compared to previous ones. If that kind of navel-gazing sounds incredibly uninteresting, then you might want to pull the rip cord now. :-)

Third time's a charm, right?

Well, yes and no. Overall I would call the summit a success, and a lot of good things came out of it. It wasn't all sunshine and puppies though, and there are definitely some things I personally, and we as a community, could improve. Which means I should have lots of interesting things to talk about in this post. Let's get right to it.

Edit Jan. 26, 2015: After discussing this with the Oslo team some more, I discovered that almost everything I said here was already covered quite well in the drop namespaces spec (that I reviewed... ;-). You're probably just as well off going and reading that, but I'm going to leave this here just in case it happens to help get the word out.

The Why

During the Kilo cycle the Oslo team has been busy deprecating the oslo. namespace in all of our projects. The first question this probably raises for most people is: why? Unfortunately the answer to that is not simple, and I'm not sure I understand some of the deeper details of it myself. However, after having talked to some of the Python packaging folks that hang around the OpenStack project we came to the conclusion that namespace packages in Python 2 are just too broken for us to continue using them.