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December 13, 2025

Stackers Network Digest — December 13, 2025

19 threads · 42 messages · openstack-discuss

The Big Picture

With the 2026.1 "Gazpacho" cycle 16 weeks from release and project teams enforcing spec freezes, this week's center of gravity was the community's own health. The OpenInfra Foundation community managers published a two-part deep dive on the contributor and maintainer experience (a survey-results post and a metrics-analysis post), and the TC's R-16 summary acknowledged a growing sentiment that existing governance is perceived as "bad bureaucracy" and is suffering from "bit rot." On the technical side, Thomas Goirand put forward a concrete heartbeat-reliability proposal for Cinder/Nova/Neutron, and Takashi Kajinami warned of a breaking dependency change in the whereto library.

Releases & Announcements

The TC's R-16 summary from Goutham Pacha Ravi is the most consequential read of the week. The December 2 TC meeting devolved (productively) into a "deep dive into the friction surrounding significant changes within the community." The team acknowledged that long-standing rules — like a Golang PTI no one uses — persist because contributors believe attempting to update them is futile, and concluded the path forward is rewriting the Technical Vision document (vision statements are time-bounded, the current one is obsolete) before pruning out-of-date policies. The FIPS compliance goal was moved back to "proposed" status pending a goal champion. Also of note: the TC is reviving the Ideas repository, and election officials were confirmed for the upcoming TC/PTL elections.

Contributor and maintainer experience analysis published. Ildikó Váncsa shared survey results and a metrics analysis covering Bobcat-through-Flamingo across 23 project teams. The dominant signal in both rounds: review attention is still the biggest issue for both maintainers and contributors. Other notable trends — Flamingo maintainer responses were more positive than Epoxy ones; broken CI was a much bigger contributor pain point this round; review-feedback quality (shallow initial reviews, nitpicky comments) is up; the average number of incoming changes per team dropped 23%. The Foundation will reach out to project teams with multiple responses for team-specific conversations.

Development & Technical Decisions

Heartbeat improvement: ping the main thread via RabbitMQ. Thomas Goirand proposed a cross-project fix prompted by a real incident: after a RabbitMQ outage, the main threads of cinder-volume and cinder-backup were dead, but the heartbeat thread kept reporting "up." Plan: instantiate a Manager class for cinder-volume, give it an is_working() method that sends a RabbitMQ ping to the main thread and waits for a pong within a timeout. WIP patch at cinder/+/970796. Arnaud Morin responded that this sounds similar to the rpc_ping_enabled feature OVH originally proposed in oslo.messaging/+/735385 — they ran it in production for years before disabling it because (1) it produced excessive RabbitMQ traffic and (2) it didn't always catch stuck worker threads, only the ping thread. Worth comparing the two designs before going far.

Breaking change: whereto is moving to PCRE2. Takashi Kajinami warned that the whereto library, used by docs builds in several projects, is replacing its dependency on python-pcre (libpcre3-dev/pcre-devel) with pcre2 because PCRE 3 is obsolete in Debian and RHEL 10 removed PCRE entirely. Once the release patch hits upper-constraints, projects need to update their bindep.txt (example diff). Takashi is volunteering to drive the transition, but flagged it for Cinder, Glance, Nova, SDK and Trove maintainers.

Nova $aggregates + JsonFilter — long thread, lots of pointers. Andy Speagle's 11-message thread — trying to schedule by aggregate name with JsonFilter — turned into a useful reference. Sean Mooney and others linked the $aggregates source in host_manager.py, the JsonFilter source, and pointed at preferred patterns: the --host/--hypervisor-hostname flags for direct host targeting, aggregate isolation, AggregateImagePropertiesIsolation, and the forbidden-aggregates Placement filter. Useful reading for anyone fighting scheduler hints.

Heads Up / Action Needed

  • docs.openstack.org rate-limit is breaking link checkers. Florian Haas reported intermittent RemoteDisconnected errors from docs.openstack.org causing his Cleura docs link checker (linkchecker) to randomly fail. He's looking for a workaround that doesn't require excluding docs.openstack.org from external link checks. If your docs CI is similarly affected, chime in.
  • Old Unmaintained-branch EOL move. Brian Haley follow-up with more details — see also Yoga runtimes, the test paste, and the releases patch. The transition affects Victoria through Yoga.
  • Operators of Kolla 2023.1, please plan a Ceph keyring check. A first-deploy thread tracked down a nova-compute deployment failure to a missing ceph.client.cinder.keyring in /var/lib/kolla/config_files/ — a common cause when keys are dropped into /etc/kolla/config/nova/ but not propagated to compute hosts.
  • Octavia compute-id for pool members: Max Harmathy asked whether anyone has a tool that returns the Nova server ID for an Octavia pool member without IP-matching plumbing. If your toolbox has this, share.
  • Migration tip from Eduardo Morais's OVS-to-OVN thread: post-migration restarts can hit a duplicate-row error in providerresourceassociations requiring a manual cleanup — worth knowing before you start the migration.

Community & Events

The Neutron team is wrapping the year quietly: Brian Haley cancelled the December 12 Drivers meeting (the open specs query is the takeaway), QA office hour for the week was cancelled, and Octavia cancelled its IRC meeting until January 7. Nova has no upstream meeting this week. The Neutron bug deputy (Dec 1 week, Slawek Kaplonski) reported one Critical (2133807 — tap-as-a-service py313 job timeout, fix at +/969567) and two Highs, including 2134338 OVN LRP prefix issue, fix at +/970056.