Hello! Thanks Greg for sharing your thoughts. The idea of splitting off DIB from OpenStack is new for me, therefore I collect some pros and cons:
Stay in OpenStack: + Use available OpenStack infrastructure and methods + OpenStack should include a possibility to create images for ironic, VMs and docker. (Yes - there are others, but DIB is the best! :-) ) + Customers use DIB because it's part of OpenStack and for OpenStack (see e.g. [1]) + Popularity of OpenStack attracts more developers than a separate project (IMHO running DIB as a separate project even lowers the low number of contributors). + 'Short Distances' if there are special needs for OpenStack. + Some OpenStack projects use DIB - and also use internal 'knowledge' (like build-, run- or test-dependencies) - it would be not that easy to completely separate this in short term. As a separate project: - Possibly less organizational overhead. - Independent releases possible. - Develop / include / concentrate also for / on other non-OpenStack based virtualization platforms (EC2, Google Cloud, ...) - Extend the use cases to something like 'DIB can install a wide range of Linux distributions on everything you want'. Example: DIB Element to install Raspberry Pi [2] (which is currently not the core use-case but shows how flexible DIB is). In my opinion the '+' arguments are more important, therefore DIB should stay within OpenStack as a sub-project. I don't really care about the master: TripleO, Infra, glance, ... I want to touch an important point: Greg you are right that there are only a very few developers contributing for DIB. One reason is IMHO, that it is not very attractive to work on DIB; some examples: o The documentation how to set up a DIB development environment [3] is out of date. o Testing DIB is nightmare: a developer has no chance to test as it is done in the CI (which is currently setup by other OpenStack projects?). Round-trip times of ~2h - and then it often fails, because of some mirror problem... o It takes sometimes very long until a patch is reviewed and merged (e.g. still open since 1y1d [6]; basic refactoring [7] was filed about 9 month ago and still not in the master). o There are currently about 100 elements in DIB. Some of them are highly hardware dependent; some are known not to work; a lot of them need refactoring. It is important to work on these topics to make DIB more attractive and possible have more contributors. Discussions about automated development environment setup [4] or better developer tests [5] started but need more attention and discussions (and maybe a different setting than a patch / review). In addition we should concentrate on the core functionalities: block device setup, minimal system installation, bootloader, kernel and ramdisk creation and a stable extensible element interface; drop non-core elements or move them to the projects where they are used. Kind regards Andre [1] https://imagefactory.otc.t-systems.com/ [2] https://github.com/florath/dib-element-raspberrypi3 [3] https://docs.openstack.org/developer/diskimage-builder/developer/index.html [4] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/419655/ [5] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/414347/ [6] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/287784/ [7] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/319591/ __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev