The Big Picture

The post-PTG digestion continued, but the week's center of gravity was a community-wide reckoning over process versus pragmatism. Clark Boylan's essay "Approaches to Making Big Changes Within Our Community" pushed back on the growing sentiment that OpenStack's policies are bureaucratic dead weight — and it dovetailed with Artem Goncharov's blunt PTG-summary follow-up about self-inflicted maintainer burnout. Underneath that meta-conversation, real engineering work moved: a proposed oslo.wsgi, several deprecations and an EOL, the Nova spec soft freeze, and a long tail of operator questions dominated by GPU passthrough and LXB-to-OVN migration. We're at R-19/R-21 toward 2026.1.

The Process Debate

"Bureaucracy isn't automatically bad." Clark Boylan argued that OpenStack's rules — Python/JS/Go only, Linux-only, specific tested distros, dropping PostgreSQL, standard-compliant test runners — each exist to shrink an enormous problem space and keep a loose multi-company collective interoperable. Rather than ignoring policy, he urged channeling frustration into changing it deliberately. The counterpoint came from Artem Goncharov, who contended in the Keystone PTG thread that the community "artificially creates" its own maintainer decline by building walls ever "higher and thicker," wearing contributors down with a spaghetti of brittle dependencies and gate breakages. Both are worth reading together; this tension underlies many of the cycle's deprecation and tooling decisions. The concrete flashpoint remained the Horizon pytest-vs-PTI question — whether Horizon plugins (e.g. watcher-dashboard) may reuse Horizon's pytest integration fixtures despite the PTI mandating stdlib unittest.

Releases & Announcements

Kolla Antelope (2023.1) goes End of Life. Bartosz Bezak announced EOL for the Antelope Kolla deliverables (Kolla, Kolla-Ansible, Kayobe, ansible-collection-kolla); Caracal (2024.1) will be marked unmaintained soon, leaving Dalmatian (2024.2) and Epoxy (2025.1) supported, with Flamingo (2025.2) imminent. Several teams posted PTG summaries — Cinder, OpenStack-Ansible, Ironic (Jay Faulkner's video). Cinder's highlights: 3rd-party CI now required for review, eventlet removal targeted before M2, and a reworked Festival of Reviews format. OpenStack-Ansible's Gazpacho plans include MariaDB read/write balancing via oslo.db slave_connection, ansible-core 2.19 adoption (2.18 EOLs May 2026), Ubuntu 26.04 support, and PKI/TLS refactoring.

Development & Technical Decisions

oslo.wsgi gains traction. Arnaud Morin endorsed Stephen Finucane's proposed library, again emphasizing cross-project consistency. Watcher moved to deprecate its Prometheus datasource in favor of the Keystone-authenticated, multi-tenant aetos datasource, and issued a second call for MAAS-integration maintainers — or it deprecates that integration in 2026.1. Horizon floated switching from inlined <style> blocks to linked stylesheets for performance, with a caveat that plugins adding SCSS files would need updates. Stephen Finucane's PSA on the requirements-check normalization change (underscores no longer mapped to hyphens) reminded projects to fix PyPI names in requirements.txt.

Heads Up / Action Needed

• Nova spec soft freeze: November 20, 23:59 UTC. René Ribaud reminded contributors that no new Gazpacho specs are accepted after that date — propose now. He also kept the Nova bug-triage volunteer roster open (Etherpad sign-up; ~180 untriaged bugs).
• RabbitMQ repo URL change. Dmitriy Rabotyagov warned OpenStack-Ansible operators that RabbitMQ moved its Debian/Ubuntu package repos from ppa1.rabbitmq.com to deb1.rabbitmq.com; existing deployments must update GPG keys and repo URLs now, with backports in flight for a proper fix.
• Contributor/maintainer surveys closed November 16 — Jeremy Stanley urged cores and contributors to complete them.
• Watcher is removing an unmaintained branch (patch proposed after no objections).

Community & Events

Process and people topics ran throughout. Jeremy Stanley recapped multiple PTG sessions on the contributor/maintainer experience ("Bridging the gap"), and Kendall Nelson launched a streamlined approach to the University Partnership Program — a shared Etherpad to collect student projects and mentors ahead of a January intake. Telemetry welcomed back Juan Larriba as PTL. OpenStack-Ansible ran its annual bug-fighting day. Operators were busy: a Windows 11 nested-virtualization boot loop on Emerald Rapids hosts (resolved by using QEMU's preferred older CPU models), GPU virtualization for AI workloads (NVIDIA L40s), a UEFI/secure-boot lightweight test-image hunt (cirros lacks UEFI), AFS-over-NAT performance woes behind OVS/DVR, firewalld gaps when adding new Kolla-Ansible services, and continued LXB→OVN migration knowledge-sharing (including community blog posts and Mario David's migration repo). A reminder also went out that the 2025 User Survey question deadline was December 1.