Comment 7 for bug 1740258

Tempest has the same stability guarantees as other projects. It just doesn't have a rest api. But for config, library interfaces, CLIs, or any other declared stable interface or end user facing bit it follows the same policy as any other project.

It can't be graceful because right now because img_dir has a default. Right now it's::

  os.path.join(CONF.scenario.img_dir, CONF.scenario.img_file)

and the desired end state is::

  os.path.abspath(CONF.scenario.img_file)

there isn't really a way to handle both without causing some interruption to end users. The normal path for something like this would be::

    if CONF.scenario.img_dir:
        LOG.warn()
        img_file = os.path.join(CONF.scenario.img_dir, CONF.scenario.img_file)
    else:
        img_file = os.path.abspath(CONF.scenario.img_file)

That way you can use the old and the new at the same time and not break anyone. But, because CONF.scenario.img_dir is always set(with that really bad default) we'll never run the else path. If we changed img_dir to not have a default that'll break people who rely on it. TBH we probably should have the deprecation warning that default would be removed in the future instead of it going away, because then that would let us make this transition in 2 cycles (after the UEC image support is removed)

The reason we don't have any alternatives suggested for the img_dir deprecation is that the current plan doesn't have any current steps It's all for a future things. The current plan (which is ~1.5 yrs behind schedule at this point) was to do:

1. deprecate img_dir and uec image options
2. remove uec options
3. remove img_dir option and switch to just using img_file as a path

and the deprecation warning is for #3 because that was supposed to happen in the same cycle as #2.

I think maybe if we still want to clean this up the path forward should be:

1. Change img_dir warning to be about the default changing (not sure of the best mechanism to do that)
2. Finish uec removal patches
3. in rocky (or s if the uec removal isn't done by the release) remove default setting for img_dir and implement the if statement above
4. in s remove img_dir