It is some time now that we are discussing an eventual repository reorganization for vdsm. In fact I'm sure that we all experienced at least once the discomfort of having several modules scattered around the tree. The main goal of the reorganization would be to place the modules in their proper location so that they can be used (imported) without any special change (or hack) even when the code is executed inside the development repository (e.g. tests).
Recently there has been an initial proposal about moving some of these modules:
http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/11858/
That spawned an interesting discussion that must involve the entire community; in fact before starting any work we should try to converge on a decision for the final repository structure in order to minimize the discomfort for the contributors that will be forced to rebase their pending gerrit patches. Even if the full reorganization won't happen in a short time I think we should plan the entire structure now and then eventually move only few relevant modules to their final location.
To start the discussion I'm attaching here a sketch of the vdsm repository structure that I envision:
. |-- client | |-- [...] | `-- vdsClient.py |-- common | |-- [...] | |-- betterPopen | | `-- [...] | `-- vdsm | |-- [...] | `-- config.py |-- contrib | |-- [...] | |-- nfs-check.py | `-- sos |-- daemon | |-- [...] | |-- supervdsm.py | `-- vdsmd `-- tool |-- [...] `-- vdsm-tool
This would allow any component (daemon, client, tool, etc...) to run in place with the only addition of PYTHONPATH=$(top_srcdir)/common. The tests would need also the additional component path but that is a given since it's what they should be testing.
Once the components are in the proper place we can eventually start using distutils inside the Makefile.am files in order to simplify the installation process (and also as verification that our repository structure is complying with the python standards).
Please get involved, share your feedback and proposals. Thanks,