Rather than establish a project for individual projects, the OPNFV community has agreed to work on establishing focus community groups where we will describe community engagement practices, identify community leaders, manage our contributions toward those communities and generally get ourselves organised well enough to be a benefit, rather than a burden, to our source communities.
In general, we would like to have a consistent process for feature requests across OPNFV projects. Since the bar in terms of structure and information seems to be highest for OpenStack, we will align feature request documentation on the OpenStack blueprint process. The process is defined for requirements projects.
However, in the case of Open vSwitch specifically, because there were a number of features which were eagerly requested by members, feature improvements for Open vSwitch are being tracked in the ovs-nfv project.
To facilitate the work of developers submitting features to Open vSwitch, we have instituted a process for requirements projects which consists of the following:
Projects first create an OPNFV requirement document in Markdown in the project repository: repository/requirements/reference_document.rst
- this document should describe the goal at a high level for OPNFV consumers
A requirement will result in one or more features for which a design should be drafted in repository/design_docs/reference_document.rst
-
After a successful community sanity check, verifying that the docs have sufficient implementation details, they should be proposed to the
discuss mailing list if they are just a descriptive document or the
dev mailing list if they are an
RFC code contribution or docs contribution.
Community comments are to be expected and multiple revisions may be required upstream before a direction has been agreed.
Communication
All collaboration with the Open vSwitch community takes place via Open vSwitch mailing lists and the Open vSwitch IRC channel:
-
-
announce@openvswitch.org: Announcements from the Open vSwitch maintainers. e.g. Release announcements, conference call for papers, etc.
-
-
IRC: #openvswitch on irc.freenode.net
Code repository
License
Open vSwitch is primarily licensed under the Apache 2 license.
Feature Submission
All features should be submitted to Open vSwitch via the mailing lists.
Like with most opensource communities, it is recommended that you engage early with the community in order to gain consensus.
As such, it is recommended that you discuss what feature you are planning to implement at an earlier stage in order to:
Inform the community what you are working on to ensure there is no duplication of effort.
Engage with fellow travelers that may be interested in working with you on the feature.
Get feedback from key community members on your approach.
Early discussion can take place in a few ways:
On the discuss or dev mailing list by outlining a description of your requirements and design. An example for OVN can be seen
here and
here
In the form of an early
RFC
patch on the dev mailing list. An example can be seen
here.
A hybrid approach could be to update the Open vSwitch documentation describing your change as if it had been implemented. A good example of this was the Open vSwitch OVN initial patchset
here
When a feature is ready for formal submission in should be submitted following the rules specified by the Open vSwitch community:
Open vSwitch Roles
Open vSwitch Releases
Currently, Open vSwitch does not have a regular release cadence.
Some releases are designated as LTS releases. These are roughly every year but not deterministic.
Details of each release (including the upcoming release) can be found in
NEWS
Releases are made when key changes have been submitted to master
branch.
-
Regular releases of Open vSwitch may happen in the
future
Open vSwitch planning process
Open vSwitch has a lightweight governance process for proposing and accepting new features.
OpenDaylight in-flight Open vSwitch features