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November 15, 2025

Stackers Network Digest — November 15, 2025

32 threads · 57 messages · openstack-discuss

The Big Picture

A week dominated by post-PTG digestion and a hard look at how OpenStack governs itself. Cinder, OpenStack-Ansible, Keystone, Ironic and Magnum all published Gazpacho PTG summaries, while a parallel current of threads — kicked off by Clark Boylan and joined by Takashi Kajinami, Artem Goncharov and others — debated whether the community's policy-and-process layer is helping or hindering contributors. The 2026.1 "Gazpacho" release is now at R-21, and project teams are starting to enforce their cycle deadlines: Nova's spec soft-freeze hit on November 20, and Kolla announced it will move Antelope (2023.1) to End-of-Life.

Releases & Announcements

Kolla 2023.1 (Antelope) is being moved to End-of-Life. Bartosz Bezak announced that Kolla, Kolla-Ansible, Kayobe and Ansible-Collection-Kolla Antelope branches are EOL because the team lacks the resources to keep supporting them; Caracal (2024.1) will follow into the unmaintained state soon. Dalmatian (2024.2) and Epoxy (2025.1) remain the supported stable releases, with Flamingo (2025.2) due in the coming weeks. (Releases patch, thread)

PTG summaries landed this week:

  • Cinder (summary) — Jon Bernard reported that 3rd-party CI is now required for patches to be reviewed, the Festival of Reviews format is being reworked to handle larger patches, eventlet removal is targeted to complete before M-2, and a longstanding RBD driver patch is back on the table. Notes: etherpad, wiki.
  • OpenStack-Ansible (summary) — Dmitriy Rabotyagov flagged Debian 13 (Trixie) and Ansible 2.18 work as already shipping, plans to leverage oslo.db's slave_connection instead of the long-deferred ProxySQL adoption, an ansible-core 2.19 push (2.18 goes EOL in May 2026), HAProxy role refactoring, and an attempt at Ubuntu 26.04 support for Gazpacho.
  • Magnum (summary) — Dale Smith reported there is no automatic migration path from the Heat driver to Cluster API: rebuild your clusters once CAPI is running. Magnum's docs will be rewritten without Heat references, CI for the CAPI drivers is being picked up by Michał Nasiadka this cycle, and the labels API (943358, 955549) is the longer-term feature focus.
  • Ironic — Jay Faulkner posted an unofficial video summary.

OpenSearch logs at opensearch.logs.openstack.org finished their upgrade.

Development & Technical Decisions

Are we strangling ourselves with process? Two long threads explored this. Artem Goncharov's response to the Keystone PTG summary argued that the community's insistence on uniform tooling, transitive dependency churn, and high bars for taking over abandoned code are wearing maintainers down. Clark Boylan pushed back that policies exist for good reasons (consistent test runners, focused language support, shared CI), and the path forward is to propose concrete, well-motivated changes — not declare bureaucracy bad by default. Jeremy Stanley collected etherpads and recordings from the four PTG sessions that touched on contributor/maintainer experience. Expect this conversation to keep going.

Proposing oslo.wsgi. Arnaud Morin's thread on consolidating WSGI plumbing across projects drew supportive replies; as an operator, Arnaud stressed the value of cross-project consistency.

Ironic reviewer/approver shuffle. Julia Kreger reviewed and accepted Jay Faulkner's proposal to promote contributors between the reviewer and approver tiers.

Watcher's MAAS integration needs maintainers. Douglas Viroel issued a second call for maintainers for the MAAS (Metal-As-A-Service) datasource integration, which is also blocking Watcher's eventlet removal. The Watcher team will deprecate the integration in 2026.1 if no volunteers step up.

Heads Up / Action Needed

  • Nova spec soft-freeze: November 20, 2025 23:59 UTC. René Ribaud's reminder — no new specs accepted after that. If you're prepping a Gazpacho spec, get it up now.
  • requirements-check no longer normalizes underscores to hyphens. Stephen Finucane explained that the move off pkg_resources to packaging for normalization in requirements/+/960845 means requirements.txt entries must use the canonical PyPI name — e.g., microversion-parse, not microversion_parse. Quick fixes shown in neutron/+/965188 and tap-as-a-service/+/966782.
  • Contributor and maintainer surveys closed November 16. The 2025.2/Flamingo cycle contributor and maintainer experience surveys were open through that weekend.
  • Nova bug triage volunteer roster. René Ribaud is collecting names for a rotation to balance bug follow-up — sign up on the etherpad.
  • OpenStack-Ansible bug-fighting day was November 13 (etherpad).
  • University Partnership Program — Kendall Nelson is collecting project ideas and mentors on an etherpad ahead of the next round of student engagements.

Community & Events

Kendall Nelson is still chasing PTG attendance numbers and team photos from about a third of the teams. Arnaud Morin's thread following up the PTG's Ops-refactoring discussion drew interest in regrouping Ops activities under a more cohesive umbrella — the Ops Radio Hour etherpad is collecting notes. Mario David shared a practical OVS-to-OVN migration writeup for anyone still on that journey, complementing GK Kumar's Linux-bridge-to-OVN guide for OpenStack-Ansible operators.