Outreachy: Redfish Message registry III and license for standard registry files

Outreachy ended last week, here is what I worked on in those last days.

I continued working on Redfish Message Registry. A quick recap, Message registry is necessary to determine severity and provide additional information about the error and possible ways to resolve the error when updating BIOS (and potentially other resources in future). It was clear that it will not be possible to finish it by the end of internship, especially as it all had to go through code reviews. Nevertheless I wanted to have at least initial version of code working from A to Z and to see if there are any more unexpected obstacles to get this to a working stage.

I ended up splitting the Message Registry functionality in 8 patches where each patch tackles something new to sushy library. At first I was avoiding creating too many patches, but I think in the end this makes review easier for everyone as from my experience so far there can be long discussions in reviews - definitely easier that each patch has only 1 (main-ish) thing to discuss rather than creating long threads about, let's say, 3 things and try to follow what's done and what's not.

The patches toward the end of the chain I have set in 'Work in Progress' mode, while they are functionally working, it will be necessary to take a closer look when their dependent patches are reviewed for some edge cases and unhappy paths. I did this it to avoid committing too much while the base of the patches might need re-write or different approach, thus these would require re-write too. But having some code working I can be more sure that there are no unexpected limitations or other things that would require changes in sushy to implement Message Registry support.

At the moment 3 patches have received one +2 each, thus there is some likelihood that they will not require major further changes. While the internship has ended, I like to finish what I have started so I'm keeping an eye on the patches and making updates at my now hobbyist capacity. Anyway, I don't mind that anyone else takes over, however at the moment these patches are missing reviews more.

Given that this is the third post where Message Registry is the main topic, it might be obvious that while I started working on implementing BIOS support in sushy, my biggest addition to sushy turns out to be Message Registry. When started working on this, it was not anticipated or, in other words, the scope and effort was not evaluated, but was discovered along the way. This is how it went - started working on BIOS -> encountered @Redfish.Settings, then -> encountered Message Registry and then -> encountered licensing issue.

Speaking of the licensing issue, it has some updates too. I already had implemented a fall-back scenario where user has to download the standard message registry files and if user has not downloaded them, then there is fall-back for fall-back - giving very limited information about the BIOS updates - only to say if it was successful or not, but no other information which attributes failed or any hints how to resolve the failure. I had this implemented so that there is at least something working while license thing is being resolved. In the legal mailing list it looked that they prefer that no 3rd party files are included in the repository, but DMTF were expecting that by having CC BY license it would be sufficient to include the files in sushy repository. But for this OpenStack technical committee has to have a case-by-case review to allow this. CC BY compability with OpenStack projects is not automatically granted, because OpenStack automatically allows only OSI-approved licenses, but as CC BY is not software license it is not covered by OSI. Anyway, it still sounded like an extra effort and serious matter, but I had no idea how big effort this could be and if sushy really needs the files included. Talked with my mentor if he has experience with technical committee and should we ask tech committee to review this case. As the mentor did not have experience with this, decided to ask this in #openstack-ironic IRC channel and there other contributors were strongly preferring that the files are included in sushy repository and included in installation package as indeed there are many customers who test Ironic without access to the Internet and this would damage user-friendliness if they have to package or download the files manually. Then in the mailing list I asked if this case can be reviewed and it was done very quickly, initial review happened within the same hours in #openstack-tc channel, and final approval happened next day resolving this in less than 24 hours. Very appreciate the fast response and even don't know why I was concerned about the effort involved. The only two things left now are that DMTF release the files under CC BY (which was necessary anyway also in the fall-back scenario so users can download the files and use them) and have to update the patch to use packaged files for standard registries and add license notices.

That's all, but stay tuned for another blog post summarizing my Outreachy internship (no sooner than next week though).