[occi-wg] moving forward

[Alexis Richardson]

Ian,

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 1:05 AM, Ian Stokes-Rees <ijstokes at spmetric.com> wrote:
>
>
> Alexis Richardson wrote:
>>
>> On the other hand, and negatively, I feel that the level of
>> participation while high has devolved into a few people talking.  No
>> matter what the quality of any individual's input, this is NOT the
>> activity the chairs want to see.  We want input from others.  And we
>> want to hear more from at least two kinds of people:
>>
>
> To get input from others, and people who cannot keep up with the volume on
> the email list, it would be really helpful if there were some kind of
> summary/pointers of the OCCI "state of play" on the main OCCI docuwiki web
> page.  I've caught up on about a months worth of OCCI mailing list today
> since the OGF sessions were slow, and looked at RESTful proposals, state
> model, spreadsheet side-by-side comparison, etc. but I don't think others
> have 4-6 hours free to trawl the mailing list to find the relevant links and
> build up a coherent picture of what OCCI is currently "about".

That is correct.

To all ----

The conversation on the list is good but nothing should be deemed
obvious unless it is in a form that makes it so.  PLEASE use the wiki
to articulate specific proposals, in a form where they can be
commented on (on the list) and improved (on the wiki).



> It has been said many times this past month, but certainly the very first
> goal of OCCI should be to settle on something totally trivial that can be
> implemented, and then produce a few implementations that do that.  From my
> perspective the absolute most trivial thing would be to instantiate a
> virtual host, get a handle to it, and then destroy it.  It sounds like this
> has already been done, but as someone has suggested, capturing this in a use
> case, describing how OCCI specifies such a scenario, then pointing to some
> implementations which actually do it would be a great first step.  Assuming
> such a trivial process would be uninteresting and pointless is forgetting
> the problem with assumptions.  Has this been done?  If so, highlight it on
> the OCCI website landing page.  If not, get it done.

This is an excellent statement of the difference between list and
wiki.  It should not be necessary to ask a question on the list, to
get an answer about something that has already been either (a) agreed,
or (b) proposed clearly.



>> Because we want to make use of prior art, at this point I am going to
>> quote Andy's email from earlier today: "If we want to take the middle
>> ground yet not sit on the fence it would be a useful exercise to see
>> what [ GoGrid ] and [ Sun ] offer and do not offer? See where our
>> efforts here could improve these published APIs and models?"
>>
>
> I've probably missed something.  Why aren't you including EC2?

EC2 is there in the matrix of existing APIs as a reference point and
it is legitimate to say "wait but EC2 has this functionality and OCCI
does not, so what requirement does EC2 meet (if any) that OCCI needs
to meet".

The notion of taking API X as a 'starting point' is based on it being:

* open (licensing)
* concrete (unambiguous, discussable, implementable)
* modifiable (a licensing issue)
* extensible (eg to add functionality or integration points)

Sun and GG (and EH) meet those criteria.  Given the Sun documents we
could take the GG and EH work and "make something better".  We could
also take the OCCI work and make something better still.

This process works when multiple users and implementers support it.
That's what I am looking for.  The keyword is multiple.  Anything else
is just hot air.

a