If I had to guess what would be a controversial topic from the mid-cycle meetup, it would have to be this slots proposal. I was actually in a Technical Committee meeting when this proposal was first made, but I’m told there were plenty of people in the room keen to give this idea a try. Since the mid-cycle Joe Gordon has written up a more formal proposal, which can be found at https://review.openstack.org/#/c/112733.
If you look at the last few Nova releases, core reviewers have been drowning under code reviews, so we need to control the review workload. What is currently happening is that everyone throws up their thing into Gerrit, and then each core tries to identify the important things and review them. There is a list of prioritized blueprints in Launchpad, but it is not used much as a way of determining what to review. The result of this is that there are hundreds of reviews outstanding for Nova (500 when I wrote this post). Many of these will get a review, but it is hard for authors to get two cores to pay attention to a review long enough for it to be approved and merged.
If we could rate limit the number of proposed reviews in Gerrit, then cores would be able to focus their attention on the smaller number of outstanding reviews, and land more code. Because each review would merge faster, we believe this rate limiting would help us land more code rather than less, as our workload would be better managed. You could argue that this will mean we just say ‘no’ more often, but that’s not the intent, it’s more about bringing focus to what we’re reviewing, so that we can get patches through the process completely. There’s nothing more frustrating to a code author than having one +2 on their code and then hitting some merge freeze deadline.
The proposal is therefore to designate a number of blueprints that can be under review at any one time. The initial proposal was for ten, and the term ‘slot’ was coined to describe the available review capacity. If your blueprint was not allocated a slot, then it would either not be proposed in Gerrit yet, or if it was it would have a procedural -2 on it (much like code reviews associated with unapproved specifications do now).
The number of slots is arbitrary at this point. Ten is our best guess of how much we can dilute core’s focus without losing efficiency. We would tweak the number as we gained experience if we went ahead with this proposal. Remember, too, that a slot isn’t always a single code review. If the VMWare refactor was in a slot for example, we might find that there were also ten code reviews associated with that single slot.
How do you determine what occupies a review slot? The proposal is to groom the list of approved specifications more carefully. We would collaboratively produce a ranked list of blueprints in the order of their importance to Nova and OpenStack overall. As slots become available, the next highest ranked blueprint with code ready for review would be moved into one of the review slots. A blueprint would be considered ‘ready for review’ once the specification is merged, and the code is complete and ready for intensive code review.
What happens if code is in a slot and something goes wrong? Imagine if a proposer goes on vacation and stops responding to review comments. If that happened we would bump the code out of the slot, but would put it back on the backlog in the location dictated by its priority. In other words there is no penalty for being bumped, you just need to wait for a slot to reappear when you’re available again.
We also talked about whether we were requiring specifications for changes which are too simple. If something is relatively uncontroversial and simple (a better tag for internationalization for example), but not a bug, it falls through the cracks of our process at the moment and ends up needing to have a specification written. There was talk of finding another way to track this work. I’m not sure I agree with this part, because a trivial specification is a relatively cheap thing to do. However, it’s something I’m happy to talk about.
We also know that Nova needs to spend more time paying down its accrued technical debt, which you can see in the huge amount of bugs we have outstanding at the moment. There is no shortage of people willing to write code for Nova, but there is a shortage of people fixing bugs and working on strategic things instead of new features. If we could reserve slots for technical debt, then it would help us to get people to work on those aspects, because they wouldn’t spend time on a less interesting problem and then discover they can’t even get their code reviewed. We even talked about having an alternating focus for Nova releases; we could have a release focused on paying down technical debt and stability, and then the next release focused on new features. The Linux kernel does something quite similar to this and it seems to work well for them.
Using slots would allow us to land more valuable code faster. Of course, it also means that some patches will get dropped on the floor, but if the system is working properly, those features will be ones that aren’t important to OpenStack. Considering that right now we’re not landing many features at all, this would be an improvement.
This proposal is obviously complicated, and everyone will have an opinion. We haven’t really thought through all the mechanics fully, yet, and it’s certainly not a done deal at this point. The ranking process seems to be the most contentious point. We could encourage the community to help us rank things by priority, but it’s not clear how that process would work. Regardless, I feel like we need to be more systematic about what code we’re trying to land. It’s embarrassing how little has landed in Juno for Nova, and we need to be working on that. I would like to continue discussing this as a community to make sure that we end up with something that works well and that everyone is happy with.
This series is nearly done, but in the next post I’ll cover the current status of the nova-network to neutron upgrade path.
