[Ovirt-devel] roadmap & development

[Perry Myers]

On 01/07/2011 01:03 PM, Darryl L. Pierce wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 07, 2011 at 03:35:44PM +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
>> I think Anthony has a good point. There was initially a lot of buzz and
>> excitement around oVirt but, if someone came upon the project now,
>> they'd be forgiven for wondering why things have gone so quiet.
>>
>> It's probably obvious to anyone following the project closely what has
>> happened - most of the developers on the project were from Red Hat and
>> when Red Hat acquired Qumranet in September 2008, Red Hat's focus
>> started moving towards releasing what eventually became RHEV.
>>
>> Since ovirt-node is the upstream of RHEV-H and ovirt-server isn't a part
>> of RHEV, Red Hat folks gradually stopped working on ovirt-server. This
>> happened quietly and without any fuss since I guess everyone hoped the
>> project would continue to flourish. This could have been handled better.
>>
>> Despite the best efforts of Arthur, Michel, Nicolas and Simon
>> ovirt-server has gone very quiet and there hasn't been a new release
>> since May.
>>
>> You're probably asking what this has to do with me? Well, I've been
>> working on RHEV-M this past year (e.g. see rhevm-api[1]) and hope that
>> RHEV-M will be open-sourced without too much more delay.
>>
>> An idea that has occurred to a few of us is that this could be a great
>> opportunity to re-invigorate and re-launch the oVirt project. That would
>> mean adding the RHEV-M codebase to oVirt (as ovirt-manager, perhaps) and
>> kick-starting oVirt again.
>
> I think this would be an outstanding path to take. I've kept in touch
> with several users of oVirt server and know that the lot of them are
> very interested in what we're doing behind the scenes.
>
>> The tricky part of this is what would happen the ovirt-server codebase.
>> Would it end up just being deprecated, or some people might be
>> interested in re-factoring it into a frontend UI talking to
>> ovirt-manager. I don't know.
>>
>> This is just an idea. Maybe it's a terrible one. Perhaps folks here feel
>> they could continue to build upon ovirt-server and make oVirt a kick-ass
>> community again?
>>
>> I only ever watched oVirt from the sidelines and I thought it rocked. I
>> really believe that we could make oVirt rock again with this idea.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
> I agree that we could pump new life into the project by open sourcing
> what we have in RHEVM and providing a clean, documented API to the
> oVirt server project. Several of the users on upstream oVirt are adept
> RoR programmers who would jump at the chance to work on this, and they
> have communicated that to me, that they hope whatever we're doing will
> get opened up soon for them to use.

Ack on everything above.  I think this would be a good path forward, and 
hope that the other folks interested in oVirt Server upstream will be 
similarly interested and willing to help out!

Thanks,

Perry