Re: [tosca] Groups - TOSCA Imperative Workflows supporting custom workflow language uploaded

[Tal Liron <tliron@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2019 at 8:47 PM Chris Lauwers <lauwers@ubicity.com> wrote:

To get back to your original question: what I meant to say is that we ought to perhaps consider splitting the language specification itself in two parts:

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• A âbaseâ spec that focuses primarily on the modeling aspects of TOSCA
• An âorchestrationâ enhancement that adds support for workflows etc.

I would say that it should not be an "extension", but really a separate spec. We can call it the "TOSCA Orchestration Language" or similar. Maybe it wouldn't have "TOSCA" in it at all. Ideally it should be a separate file entirely, perhaps one per workflow. So, for example, a CSAR file can include one topology and several workflow artifacts.

I remain skeptical that anyone would ever create such an orchestrator -- the market is full of mature orchestrators and it's hard for me to see what would be so attractive about a new one. I think we should focus on making TOSCA consumable by popular, actually-existing orchestrators.

• All of this is independent of how we deal with âprofilesâ. We should have a discussion about whether it makes sense to decouple the language specification from the type system. The fact that TOSCA automatically imports normative types based on the version of the language has always bugged me a bit.

OK, so what can we do to fix this? This bugs me *a lot* -- I continue to insist that the very poor quality of these basic types, and the unrealistic expectation that they could ever be used to "write once, deploy everywhere", will continue to hurt TOSCA adoption.

Can we make this separation -- language spec, basic types spec -- for TOSCA 1.3? What about TOSCA 2.0?