2016-01-19 Stackforge Namespace Retirement

Introduction

When the 2015-06-15 Stackforge Namespace Retirement was originally adopted, the TC felt that the term “Stackforge” was still useful as a sort of shorthand for “the area where unofficial projects can develop before they became official”. In keeping with that, we have continued to refer to the hosting space for unofficial projects as “Stackforge”. This has certainly resulted in people thinking our documentation was out of date, and has also likely resulted in missed opportunities to communicate that projects within openstack/ but not approved by the TC are unofficial, rather than official OpenStack projects.

This updated resolution reflects the TC’s revised intention to retire not only the “stackforge” namespace but also the term itself in favor of “unofficial project”.

Updated Resolution

The Stackforge project provides an environment for projects to share the OpenStack project’s development resources and methodology, and otherwise participate in the OpenStack community. It enables projects to deeply interact with OpenStack in development and testing, whether they seek to become “core” OpenStack projects or not.

This is an extremely valuable service that benefits our entire community, including new as well as established projects.

With recent changes in project governance, the OpenStack project has opened itself to including a much wider range of projects under its umbrella. Because of this, projects are moving between Stackforge and OpenStack at a much higher frequency than previously.

The names of projects hosted in the OpenStack project infrastructure have prefixes that have been used for distinguishing Stackforge (“stackforge/”) and OpenStack (“openstack/”) projects. Because these prefixes form part of the full name of the project’s source code repository, organizational changes entail renaming the project. This is complex for the Infrastructure team and very disruptive to developers, operators, and users.

In order to simplify software development lifecycle transitions of Unofficial and Official OpenStack projects, all projects developed within the OpenStack project infrastructure will be permitted to use the “openstack/” namespace. The use of the term “Stackforge” to describe unofficial projects should be considered deprecated.

The “openstack/” namespace is intended to convey that projects contained within it are hosted on OpenStack infrastructure. Only some of the projects within will be official OpenStack projects themselves. As such, there should not be any new requirements such as CLA signing. This resolution should not alter the workflow of any of the projects.