First of all I want to say thanks to everyone for coming. We had a lot of good debates and received some first hand feedback from our users. Hopefully most of this debates will result into some actual code soon :)
I've included a short recap and some action items bellow. Each section first contains a short problem description and a solution we agreed upon afterwards. *Pricing data distribution* Currently we bundle JSON file with provider pricing data with every release. There is no documented and easy way for user to update this file or for us to ship an updated version without releasing a new version of Libcloud. We should provide easy way to update this file which includes the following: * Command line tool for updating the file - user can specify a custom URL to the file. By default it should point to the latest version from the version control ( https://svn.apache.org/viewvc/libcloud/trunk/libcloud/data/pricing.json?view=co ) * Modify the code so it also tries to find the default pricing data file in /home/user/.libcloud_data/pricing.json (or whatever) directory * Document this process and add it to the documentation page * Note: Most of code for this functionality already exists ( https://github.com/apache/libcloud/blob/trunk/libcloud/pricing.py). We just need to add a code for downloading a file from a remote server and the cli tool. *Exception reporting for partial failures in the methods which result in multiple API calls / HTTP requests* * * Currently we have no standard interface for exceptions which get raised during a partial failure in a method which has side affects. Partial failure means that a function which performs multiple API calls failed half way through and this potentially resulted in some (but not all) resources getting created. We should provide a special exception for cases like this. This exception should contain information about resources which got created. Users can then use this information to perform "rollback" / cleanup partially created resources. *Support for the async API in the core* * * Currently we only expose sync / blocking API. This mostly works OK for simple command line scripts, but it's less than ideal for long running process or applications which performs a lot of API calls which could be made more efficient and faster if we supported an async api. As part of this change we would eventually need to refactor every driver which would also provide other side benefits such as: * More maintainable code (smaller functions) * Easier way to handle partial failures / exceptions We didn't come to a consensus on everything, but we agreed on a couple of things: * Change should be backward compatible, we should default to sync API and existing behavior code / shouldn't change * New async API should be available separately (e.g. under libcloud.async.* or whatever it ends up being) * We should refactor internal code to follow new interfaces defined in the PEP 3156 (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3156/) * We should start with a small scale experiment and try this in a single method in a single compute driver *Documentation* We are weak on the documentation side. Going forward we should strictly enforce that every patch which adds new code / functionality contains documentation and appropriate docstrings. *Migrating to git* We want to make contributing as easy as possible and SVN doesn't help with that and increases barrier to entry. Action item here is me opening an Apache Infrastructure ticket for switching to git. *Dropping support for Python 2.5* Supporting Python 2.5 adds code complexity which we would like to avoid. Main problem is that a bunch of CLI tools based on Libcloud usually also run on older versions of Linux (e.g. RHEL 5) which still ship with Python 2.5. We didn't managed to actually talk about this one, but we should explore an option of removing support for Python 2.5 in the future release. If you have attended the meetup, feel free to share your notes and or / feedback. For other people who didn't attend - you are still more than welcome and encouraged to share your feedback with us here on the mailing list. - Tomaz
