[RFE] A common description field for Neutron resources

[Li Ma]

The user story is: Users can see human-readable security group
descriptions in Horizon because the security group model contains a
description field, but no such field exists for security group rules.
This makes it very confusing for users who have to manage complex
security groups.

I agree that one could encode descriptions as tags, but the problem I
see is that API consumers(Horizon, Users) would have to agree on some
common encoding. For example... To expose a security group rule
description in Horizon, horizon would have to apply and read tags like
'description:SSH Access for Mallory'.

With a tags-based implementation, if a user wants the description for a
security group rule via the API, they have to get the security group,
then filter the tags according to whatever format horizon chose to
encode the description as.

This is in contrast to getting the description of a security group: Get
the security group and access the description attribute.

I think that resource tags are great, but this seems like a
non-intuitive workaround for a specific data model problem: Security
Groups have descriptions, but Security Group Rules do not.

A discussion is under way in the mailing list:
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-September/074046.html

[Li Ma (nick-ma-z)]

Firstly, it is easy to add a description for security group rule data model. But as stated above, description field is not like that tag field.

If each Neutron resource has a description field, it is easy for end-users to define its own message on a given resource object. Tag is used to classify but description is used to intuitively describe end-users thoughts.

[Akihiro Motoki (amotoki)]

There are two points discussed in this bug description: description field and tag approach.
These two are different things and I would suggest to discuss them separately.

I agree that description field for security group rule or some other resources are useful.
It is useful for users that each resource has at least one of name or description field.

Regarding tags, I think it should be discussed as cross-project topic.
I don't see any merits in discussing it only in neutron. It brings inconsistent user experiences to users and this kind of big concept is better to be discussed more broadly.

Anyway could you split two topics in separate RFE bugs?

[Li Ma (nick-ma-z)]

Actually in this rfe, I introduce description field for neutron, not tagging.
The reason why I describe tagging is that I wanna explain why description is also useful even if tagging is existed.

By the way, a blueprint for tagging is proposed.
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/neutron/+spec/add-tags-to-core-resources

[Akihiro Motoki (amotoki)]

I got it. "Description" and "tag" are different.
"Description" can contain a long and free format description.
"Tag" is a short string with a reasonable definition.

Description for security group rules sounds reasonable and useful.
Perhaps having a common description field may be useful. The same thing can apply to "name" field.

[Henry Gessau (gessau)]

This can use Kevin's common attribute table, https://review.openstack.org/222079