Hello Everyone,

We are in the unfortunate position of not knowing how good our OpenStack API XML
support is. All of our integration tests use json. Many of the compute
extensions don't even have XML deserializers. We also assume that there bugs we
don't even know about due to underuse. We need to do something about XML by
Folsom, because releasing a buggy api isn't good for anyone.

We don't want to alienate the communtity by dropping XML support, but we also
can't recommend it in its current state. If there are people out there who use
XML (or want to use XML) we need your help. We need help identifying what works
and what doesn't, we need bug reports, and we need merge proposals for the extra
serializers and fixes that are important. Nova-core has too much going on right
now to tackle XML.

I see a few potential results from this effort.

1) We get a lot of community support and we manage to get XML into usable shape
by Folsom.

2) We get enough community support to get the core api working and the most
important extensions in place. We release clear documentation on what is
expected to work.

3) We get no support, in which case we mark XML support deprecated and encourage
people to use JSON only.

Note that other openstack projects only support json, and there are already java
bindings that use json so option 3) isn't terrible, but we don't want to go that
route without discussing it with the community first. If anyone has alternative
solutions or suggestions, feel free to let me know.

Thanks, Vish