Dear OpenStack team,

I’m a Ph.D. student in software engineering at the ETS Montreal, University of Quebec working on the quality and configuration of web-based software systems. I’m particularly interested in analyzing configuration files from different OpenStack files. One of the main challenges I am currently facing is the proper identification of configuration files. I’m mostly confused between the python files used for production and the python files used for configuration. I am kindly requesting your precious help with the following questions:

1- How to distinguish between python files used for configuration and python files used for production? It will be very helpful if there are some configuration-based patterns (eg, textual patterns or expressions) that we can find in python files to help us distinguish between source code and configuration files?

2- Certain python files use the oslo_config to access and define configuration options. Could "all" these python files be considered as configuration files? For example, the following python file of the keystone project: keystone/keystone/conf/auth.py, is it considered a source code or a configuration file?

3- Why are there different source code and configuration repositories for OpenStack projects (eg, nova and puppet-nova)? For instance, does the OpenStack-nova service have some configuration files in its repository and have the puppet-nova as a separate configuration repository as well?

Thank you very much in advance for your time and your help!

Kind regards, Narjes Bessghaier

Narjes Bessghaier

Ph.D student in Software Engineering

École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS)| University of Quebec

Montreal, Canada

narjes.bessghaier.1@ens.etsmtl.camailto:yasmine.makroum.1@ens.etsmtl.ca