nova client help does not indicate admin actions

I don't think this is a bug, because:
1. nova client just acts as an API caller, which does not know policy.json at all.
2. policy.json is just one of implementations. For example, We can implementation policy with SQL backend.
3. policy is dynamic. Operators can define their own rules in policy.

I think this is an important issue that needs to be resolved. The implication of what you are saying is that whether or not a particular Compute API requires admin is not part of the spec for the API. Of course operators can implement their own policies. They can also change the code even if there was no policy file mechanism. But I think it would be most helpful for users and openstack as a whole if the admin-ness of official openstack apis, whether deployed as extensions or not, was part of the spec.

This is not something we can fix easily for the current version of the apis, but it might be nice to expose extra metadata on extensions if they are admin-only or even only show the extensions at /extensions that the user can access. Then novaclient could display whether or not the extension is actually available.

Seems like this should be proposed as a blueprint for future work. Marking as confirmed as it is a real issue, but as vish said, not something that is easy to address at this point.

This wishlist bug has been open five years without any activity.
I'm going to move it to "Opinion / Wishlist", which is an easily-obtainable queue of older requests that have come on.
This bug can be reopened (set back to "New") if someone decides to work on this.