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key transition time
I’ve transitioned to a new key – announcement here or below. If you’ve signed my key in the past please consider signing my new key to get it integrated into the web of trust. Thanks! -----BEGIN PGP...
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Learning is hard
I feel like I’m taking a big personal risk writing this, even though I know the internet is large and probably no-one will read this . So, dear reader, please be gentle. As we grow – as people, as...
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Distributed bugtracking – quick thoughts
Just saw http://sny.no/2014/04/dbts and I feel compelled to note that distributed bug trackers are not new – the earliest I personally encountered was Aaron Bentley’s Bugs everywhere – coming up on...
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Test processes as servers
Since its very early days subunit has had a single model – you run a process, it outputs test results. This works great, except when it doesn’t. On the up side, you have a one way pipeline – there’s no...
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what-poles-for-the-tent
So Monty and Sean have recently blogged about about the structures (1, 2) they think may work better for OpenStack. I like the thrust of their thinking but had some mumblings of my own to add. Firstly,...
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A few thoughts on defects vs bugs vs blueprints vs tasks
One of the constant debates while I’ve been programming has been that of how to organise work. Are bugs different to blueprints? I’ve been mulling over a new tracker for a while (just because none of...
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Dealing with deps in OpenStack
We’ve got a problem in OpenStack.. dependency management. In this post I explore it as input to the design summit session on this in Vancouver. Goals We have some goals that are broadly agreed:...
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Improving dependency handling upstream (for openstack)
This is, in part, a follow up to my post a few weeks ago. I want to touch on the things we need to improve to have robust plumbing supporting openstack’s CI and devstack needs. Extras We want to be...
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Revisiting the Fixture API – handling leaky resources
Fixtures are one of the innovations I’m most happy with. A Fixture is an enhanced context manager. The enhancements are: There’s an API for gathering debugging information from the fixture (rather than...
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Bootstrapping developer environments for OpenStack
When I first joined OpenStack, it was incredibly hard to get a development environment working. Its better now in some ways, but not in others. There are three key things. Firstly, if you’re going to...
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The merits of (careful) impatience
The Python packaging ecosystem has long desired a overhaul and implementation of designed features, but it often stalls on adoption. I think its time to propose a guiding principle for incremental...
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Testrepository roadmap 2015/16
Testrepository has been moderately successful – its very good at some of the things it aspired to (e.g. debugging sporadic test failures in parallel environments), but other angles have not really been...
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Graceful introduction of test servers
A test server acts as a little RPC server where we can ask it to run some tests without paying a full new-process startup cost each time. They are a necessary precondition to online scheduling of tests...
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OpenStack Mitaka debrief
Well, last week was the 6-monthly OpenStack summit in Tokyo. It was fantastic to catch up with many folk, but with 5000 attendees, there are many more that I didn’t see than those that I did. Yet I...
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signalling via exit status in Python
A common idiom in non-trivial command line tools is to have more than two return codes. For instance, diff uses 0 for ‘same inputs’, 1 for ‘different inputs’, 2 for ‘trouble’. Doing that in Python is a...
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diagnosing flaky tests
Victor (here, here) grabbed me on IRC yesterday for some testr help. He had a super frustrating bug in glance: about one in thirty unit test runs, a test would fail. He’d spent hours tracking it down...
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SkyDNS in Kubernetes 1.3 local clusters
If you want to run kubernetes locally – not in a VM – then you’ll probably also want DNS service integration to work. Thats fine, except by default it doesn’t work😦. This may be due to DNS being a...
View ArticleMonads and Python
When I wrote this I was going to lead in by saying: I’ve been spending a chunk of time recently thinking about how best to represent Monads in Python. Then I forgot I had this draft for 3 years. So.. I...
View ArticleMoney doesn’t matter
Well, obviously it does. But the whole ‘government cannot pay for healthcare’, or land, or education : thats nonsense. And any politician that claims that is either ignorant, or has an agenda that...
View ArticleIs OpenStack’s mission broken?
tl;dr: Betteridge’s law applies. Ease of development is self inflicted and not mission creep. Ease of use is self inflicted and not mission creep. Ease of operations is self inflicted and not mission...
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