On Dec 29, 2013, at 5:24 PM, Michael Still <mi...@stillhq.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 11:51 AM, John Dickinson <m...@not.mn> wrote:
>> On Dec 29, 2013, at 2:05 PM, Michael Still <mi...@stillhq.com> wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
>>> Perhaps step one is to work out what tags we think are useful and at
>>> what time they should execute?
>> 
>> I think this is exactly what I don't want. I don't want a set of predefined 
>> tags.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Super aggressive trimming, because I want to dig into this one bit some 
> more...
> 
> I feel like anything that requires pro-active action from the target
> audience will fail. For example, in nova we've gone through long
> cycles with experimental features where we've asked deployers to turn
> on new features in labs and report problems before we turn it on by
> default. They of course don't.
> 
> So... I feel there is value in a curated list of tags, even if we
> allow additional tags (a bit like launchpad). In fact, the idea of a
> "DeployImpact" tag for example really works for me. I'm very tempted
> to implement that one in notify_impact now.

Yup, I understand and agree with where you are coming from. Let's discuss 
DeployImpact as an example.

First, I like the idea of some set of curated tags (and you'll see why at the 
end of this email). Let's have a way that we can tag a commit as having a 
DeployImpact. Ok, what does that mean? In some manner of speaking, _every_ 
commit has a deployment impact. So maybe just things that affect upgrades? Is 
that changes? New features? Breaking changes only (sidebar: why would these 
sort of changes ever get merged anyway? moving on...)? My point is that a 
curated list of tags ends up being fairly generic to the point of not being too 
useful.

Ok, we figured out the above questions (ie when to use DeployImpact and when to 
not use it). Now I'm a deployer and packager (actually not hypothetical, since 
my employer is both for Swift), so what do I do? Do I have to sign up for some 
sort of thing? Does this mean a gerrit code review cycle to some -infra 
project? That would be a pretty high barrier for getting access to that info. 
Or maybe the change-merged action for a DeployImpact tag simply sends an email 
to a new DeployImpact mailing list or puts a new row in a DB somewhere that is 
shown on some page ever time I load it? In that case, I've still got to sign up 
for a new mailing list (and remember to not filter it and get everyone in my 
company who does deployments to check it) or remember to check a particular 
webpage before I do a deploy.

Maybe I'm thinking about this wrong way. Maybe the intended audience is the 
rest of the OpenStack dev community. In that case, sure, now I have a way to 
find DeployImpact commits. That's nice, but what does that get me? I already 
see all the patches in my email and on my gerrit dashboard. Being able to 
filter the commits is nice, but constraining that to an approved list of tags 
seems heavy-handed.

So while I like the idea of a curated list of tags, in general, I don't think 
they lessen the burden for the intended audience (the intended audience being 
people not in the dev/contributor community but rather those deploying and 
using the code). That's why a tool that can parse git commit messages seems 
simple and flexible enough to meet the needs of deployers (eg run `git log 
<commit> | tagged-search deployimpact` before packaging) without requiring the 
overhead of managing a curated tag list via code repo changes (as DocImpact is 
today).

All that being said, I'll poke some holes in my own idea. The problem with my 
idea is letting deployers know what tags they should actually search for. In 
this case, there probably should be some curated list of high-level tags that 
should be used across all OpenStack projects. In other words, if I use 
deploy-change on my patch and you use DeploymentImpact, then what does a 
packager/deployer search for? There should be some set of tags with guidelines 
for their usage on the wiki. I'd propose starting with ConfigDefaultChanged, 
DependencyChanged, and NewFeature.

--John




> 
> Michael
> 
> -- 
> Rackspace Australia
> 
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