The Big Picture

Two storylines defined the week. First, nomination season for the combined 2026.2 PTL and TC elections officially opened on February 4, with the TC simultaneously resetting leadership for cross-cutting teams. Second — and more painful day to day — the Python packaging ecosystem broke OpenStack's gates again: setuptools v82.0.0 removed pkg_resources, touching Kolla builds, pep8 jobs, and more across the project. Gazpacho is at R-7 (seven weeks out), Oslo and the OpenStack client/SDK hit their feature freeze this week, and Manila used the moment to retire two pieces of long-deprecated surface area.

Development & Technical Decisions

setuptools 82 removes pkg_resources — and breaks things. Michael Still raised the alarm that setuptools v82.0.0 dropped pkg_resources, breaking Kolla builds and likely more; he noted setuptools isn't listed in upper-constraints because it's typically a distro package, which complicates pinning. The thread (17 messages, 9 participants) was the week's most active and rippled into the pep8 jobs across multiple repos. Several CI failures piled on top: the openstacksdk-functional-devstack job went to 100% failure (a router-interface response that returns project_id where the SDK test still expects tenant_id, likely from neutron change 972982), nova-next hit a 100% fail tied to a Cinder bug (2127196, fixes proposed on both sides), and nova-alt-configurations broke on RBAC after a tempest change. The recurring advice all week: hold your rechecks until fixes land.

Manila trims legacy surface area in Gazpacho. Carlos Silva announced two removals landing in 2026.1: the legacy manila CLI (deprecated since Zed, now at full feature parity with the openstack share OSC plugin) will no longer be installed or supported, and the V1 API — deprecated for nearly a decade — is being removed entirely, with the /v1 endpoint ceasing to exist (v2 microversion 2.0 is identical to v1). Anyone with automation still calling manila directly or hitting /v1 needs to migrate to the openstack CLI and the V2 API now.

A real-world Noble upgrade migration snag. Chang Xue described live-migration trouble while upgrading from Ubuntu Jammy to Noble: VMs created before applying a required libvirt patch (review 967570) can't live-migrate to Noble at all, and migrations back to Jammy show ~10-second post-migration network latency. Attempts to add a managed='no' flag to the libvirt XML let old VMs reach Noble but didn't clear the latency. It's a concrete cautionary tale for operators planning the Jammy→Noble jump.

Cross-project driver onboarding. The InfoScale team (Alokedip Choudhuri) worked through the coordinated workflow for landing a new storage backend across Cinder, os-brick, and Nova, and — having missed the 2026.1 deadlines — confirmed they'll target 2026.2, preparing Gerrit reviews for early feedback once master reopens. A clean example of the cross-project driver process.

Heads Up / Action Needed

• Nomination window: PTL and TC nominations opened Feb 4 and ran until Feb 18, 23:45 UTC; voting follows Feb 25–Mar 18. PTLs win by acclaim if uncontested; a TC poll only happens with more than five candidates. Goutham Pacha Ravi posted his TC re-candidacy, and René Ribaud announced his Nova/Placement PTL candidacy (with Eventlet removal expected to complete this cycle).
• Oslo / client / SDK feature freeze took effect this week per the R-7 TC summary; these stay frozen until past the coordinated release.
• TC drops the FIPS compliance cross-community goal: maintaining the test jobs had grown too large for individual effort. Project teams may now tear down FIPS jobs or maintain them at their discretion; reviving the goal would require a committed team, a clear test definition, and maintainers.
• TC resets Oslo and Requirements leadership so both can elect a PTL — a deliberate signal that these near-universal dependencies need more maintainers. If you can help, the TC wants to hear from you.

Community & Events

The Digital Sovereignty WG held its February 4 meeting (recording posted) and asked participants to draft "stance" text on why OpenInfra supports digital sovereignty, plus a poll for the mid-February meeting time. Ghanshyam Maan opened the QA vPTG topic etherpad (add topics by Feb 17) and rescheduled the RBAC policy-popup meeting an hour later. Cyborg restarted its weekly IRC meeting (moving to Tuesdays 14:00 UTC), Cinder ran its Festival of Reviews, and Allison Price kicked off an effort to streamline the OpenStack User Survey (input wanted in the etherpad by April 15, changes targeted for August). Ironic's Jay Faulkner continued the physical-location-API discussion, signaling it as a PTG item. A Keystone federation thread from a PhD researcher also sought operator input on real-world mapping-rule and attribute practices.