Open Stack

On 10/10/2013 08:43 PM, Tim Smith wrote:
<snip>
> Again, I don't have any vested interest in this discussion, except that
> I believe the concept of "reviewer karma" to be counter to both software
> quality and openness. In this particular case it would seem that the
> simplest solution to this problem would be to give one of the hyper-v
> team members core reviewer status, but perhaps there are consequences to
> that that elude me.

There are very deep consequences to that. The core team model, where you 
have 15 - 20 reviewers, but it only takes 2 to land code, only works 
when the core teams share a culture. This means they know, or are 
willing to learn, code outside their comfort zone. Will they catch all 
the bugs in that? nope. But code blindness hits everyone, and there are 
real implications for the overall quality and maintainability of a 
project as complicated as Nova if everyone only stays in their 
comfortable corner.

Also, from my experience in Nova, code contributions written by people 
that aren't regularly reviewing outside of their corner of the world are 
demonstrably lower quality than those who are. Reviewing code outside 
your specific area is also educational, gets you familiar with norms and 
idioms beyond what simple style checking handles, and makes you a better 
developer.

We need to all be caring about the whole. That culture is what makes 
OpenStack long term sustainable, and there is a reason that it is 
behavior that's rewarded with more folks looking at your proposed 
patches. When people only care about their corner world, and don't put 
in hours on keeping things whole, they balkanize and fragment.

Review bandwidth, and people working on core issues, are our most 
constrained resources. If teams feel they don't need to contribute 
there, because it doesn't directly affect their code, we end up with 
this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

So it's really crazy to call OpenStack less open by having a culture 
that encourages people to actually work and help on the common parts. 
It's good for the project, as it keeps us whole; it's good for everyone 
working on the project, because they learn about more parts of 
OpenStack, and how their part fits in with the overall system; and it 
makes everyone better developers from learning from each other, on both 
sides of the review line.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net