Blueprints and Specs

The Glance team uses the glance-specs repository for its specification reviews. Detailed information can be found here. Please also find additional information in the reviews.rst file.

The Glance team enforces a deadline for specs proposals. It’s a soft freeze that happens after the first milestone is cut and before the second milestone is out. There’s a freeze exception week that follows the freeze week. A new proposal can still be submitted during this period, but be aware that it will most likely be postponed unless a particularly good argument is made in favor of having an exception for it.

Please note that we use a template for spec submissions. It is not required to fill out all sections in the template. Review of the spec may require filling in information left out by the submitter.

Spec Notes

There are occasions when a spec will be approved and the code will not land in the cycle it was targeted at. For these cases, the work flow to get the spec into the next release is as follows:

  • Anyone can propose a patch to glance-specs which moves a spec from the previous release into the new release directory.

The specs which are moved in this way can be fast-tracked into the next release. Please note that it is required to re-propose the spec for the new release however and that it’ll be evaluated based on the resources available and cycle priorities.

Glance Spec Lite

In Mitaka the team introduced the concept of lite specs. Lite specs are small features tracked as Launchpad bugs, with status wishlist and tagged with the new ‘spec-lite’ tag, and allow for the submission and review of these feature requests before code is submitted.

This allows for small features that don’t warrant a detailed spec to be proposed, evaluated, and worked on. The team evaluates these requests as it evaluates specs. Once a bug has been approved as a Request for Enhancement (RFE), it’ll be targeted for a release.

The workflow for the life of a spec-lite in Launchpad is as follows:

  • File a bug with a small summary of what the request change is following the format below:
  • The bug is triaged and tagged with the spec-lite tag.
  • The bug is evaluated and marked as Triaged to announce approval or to Won’t fix to announce rejection or Invalid to request a full spec.
  • The bug is moved to In Progress once the code is up and ready to review.
  • The bug is moved to Fix Committed once the patch lands.

In summary:

State Meaning
New This is where spec-lite starts, as filed by the community.
Triaged Drivers - Move to this state to mean, “you can start working on it”
Won’t Fix Drivers - Move to this state to reject a lite-spec.
Invalid Drivers - Move to this state to request a full spec for this request

The drivers team will be discussing the following bug reports during their IRC meeting:

Lite spec Submission Guidelines

Before we dive into the guidelines for writing a good lite spec, it is worth mentioning that depending on your level of engagement with the Glance project and your role (user, developer, deployer, operator, etc.), you are more than welcome to have a preliminary discussion of a potential lite spec by reaching out to other people involved in the project. This usually happens by posting mails on the relevant mailing lists (e.g. openstack-dev - include [glance] in the subject) or on #openstack-glance IRC channel on Freenode. If current ongoing code reviews are related to your feature, posting comments/questions on gerrit may also be a way to engage. Some amount of interaction with Glance developers will give you an idea of the plausibility and form of your lite spec before you submit it. That said, this is not mandatory.

When you submit a bug report on https://bugs.launchpad.net/glance/+filebug, there are two fields that must be filled: ‘summary’ and ‘further information’. The ‘summary’ must be brief enough to fit in one line: if you can’t describe it in a few words it may mean that you are either trying to capture more than one lite spec at once, or that you are having a hard time defining what you are trying to solve at all.

The ‘further information’ section must be a description of what you would like to see implemented in Glance. The description should provide enough details for a knowledgeable developer to understand what is the existing problem and what’s the proposed solution.

Once you are happy with what you wrote, set the importance to Wishlist, and submit. Do not worry, we are here to help you get it right! Happy hacking.

Lite spec from existing bugs

If there’s an already existing bug that describes a small feature suitable for a spec-lite, all you need to do is change the importance field to Wishlist. Please don’t create a new bug! The comments and history of the existing bug are important for the spec-lite review.

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