The Big Picture

The week was defined by governance turning over for the next cycle. The combined PTL and Technical Committee elections for 2026.1 "Gazpacho" closed on September 17, and results landed mid-week. With voting done and the Flamingo (2025.2) release just one week out (R-1), the community pivoted from campaigning to release-blocker hunting. Two quieter but consequential maintenance stories also surfaced: a looming dependency risk for Heat and Mistral, and continued fallout from Skyline's stalled review pipeline.

Releases & Announcements

The 2026.1 Gazpacho TC election seated four members: Sylvain Bauza (bauzas), Jens Harbott (frickler), Tony Breeds (tonyb), and Doug Goldstein (cardoe). Slawek Kaplonski, on behalf of the election officials, also published the full PTL results across ~34 project teams. Notable continuity and changes: Brian Haley stays on Neutron, Rene Ribaud (Uggla) leads Nova, Jon Bernard keeps Cinder, Carlos Silva keeps Manila, Michal Nasiadka keeps Kolla, Tatiana Ovchinnikova keeps Horizon (the one PTL seat that was contested), and Takashi Kajinami picks up Heat, Puppet OpenStack, and Storlets. Arnaud Morin (amorin) takes Mistral as a first-time PTL. Several projects still have no candidate, and the TC will appoint leadership for those.

Kendall Nelson published the official October 2025 PTG team list (the virtual PTG runs Oct 27-31). Confirmed OpenStack teams include Blazar, Cinder, CloudKitty, Ironic, Keystone, Kolla, Magnum, Manila, Neutron, Nova, Octavia, Horizon, OpenStack-Ansible, Sunbeam, Swift, and Telemetry, plus the Eventlet Removal team, i18n, Release Management, and the TC. Teams not on the list were told to contact ptg@openinfra.dev immediately. The TC's R-2 summary confirmed nearly all cycle-with-rc deliverables had shipped a first RC, with the next two weeks reserved for finding and fixing release blockers ahead of the October 1 coordinated release.

Development & Technical Decisions

A dependency time bomb under Heat and Mistral. Takashi Kajinami opened a thoughtful "[heat][mistral][tc] Status of ply" thread flagging that yaql — the library both projects use for flexible user input — depends on ply, whose author has declared no further releases and recommends vendoring the code into consumers. Kajinami's leading proposal is to import ply into yaql (e.g. yaql._ply) with a license note, but he's seeking TC guidance to keep license expectations clean. Alternatives (writing a parser, or dropping yaql entirely) are on the table; he notes the Heat impact may be limited since it was added for the now-retired TripleO, while Mistral removal would hurt more. This is an active discussion, not a settled decision.

Skyline's maintenance gap drew attention. Doug Goldstein detailed that both skyline-console and skyline-apiserver have had broken tests for a while, with no non-core patch merged since June 12 and no core review activity on outside patches since then. A new wave of contributors from another organization is offering test fixes, bug fixes, features, and 2025.1 backport requests, and Goldstein is asking what's needed to get this work landing to keep the project healthy. This thread continues into following weeks.

On the operator-debugging front, the standout was a deep Nova "API call duration increases after upgrading to Caracal" thread: Chang Xue traced the regression to the jsonschema library, finding that forcing jsonschema >= 4.0 (a change whose main purpose was test cleanup) introduced latency, and that downgrading to 3.2.0 cleared it (Nova bug 2121607). Tobias Urdin followed up in the tracker — worth watching for operators on Caracal. Joel McLean contributed a detailed diagnostic checklist for a stuck live-migration that never completes its memory copy, pointing at NUMA/hugepages topology, PCI passthrough non-migratable devices, and wait_for_vif_plug behavior.

The TC's R-2 notes also flagged a broader effort to standardize MySQL/MariaDB charset and collation across projects — specifically migrating from utf8 (an alias for utf8mb3 that MariaDB plans to remove) to utf8mb4, with a known Ironic index-size conflict under utf8mb4. The TC is gathering per-project data before making this a community goal.

Heads Up / Action Needed

• Final Flamingo release blockers: With the coordinated release set for October 1, teams should be testing RCs and resolving blockers this week. The releases repo reopens for Gazpacho once Flamingo ships.
• oslo.messaging QManager backport: Dmitriy Rabotyagov asked reviewers to land the 2025.1 backport (review 958848) so the fix ships with a new oslo.messaging bugfix release.
• PTG no-shows: Any team meeting at the October PTG that isn't on Kendall Nelson's list must contact the PTG organizers immediately.

Community & Events

The Outreachy December 2025 cohort call for mentors went out (Dmitry Tantsur), with proposals due September 26 and funding for only one intern — more project ideas are wanted so interns have a choice. Ildiko Vancsa reminded everyone the Ops Radio Hour runs September 26 at 1300 UTC (Swift compliance processes on the agenda; the group is trialing a Matrix room). Tatiana Ovchinnikova opened the Horizon PTG etherpad for 2026.1 topics, and Felipe Reyes stepped up to act as PTL for OpenStack Charms. Operator questions ranged from Ceph DB/WAL SSD sizing to VPNaaS multi-tunnel support on strongSwan (Dalmatian) and experimenting with VPP for Neutron L3 routing.