[openstack-dev] [Nova] Blueprint review process

Russell Bryant rbryant at redhat.com
Tue Oct 29 20:58:18 UTC 2013


On 10/29/2013 04:24 PM, Stefano Maffulli wrote:
> On 10/28/2013 10:28 AM, Russell Bryant wrote:
>> 2) Setting clearer expectations.  Since we have so many blueprints for
>> Nova, I feel it's very important to accurately set expectations for how
>> the priority of different projects compare.  In the last cycle,
>> priorities were mainly subjectively set by me.  Setting priorities based
>> on what reviewers are willing to spend time on is a more accurate
>> reflection of the likelihood of a set of changes making it in to the
>> release.
> 
> I'm all for managing expectations :) I had a conversation with Tom about
> this and we agreed that there may be a risk that new contributors with
> not much karma in the project would have a harder time getting their
> blueprint assigned higher priorities. If a new group proposes a
> blueprint, they may need to "court" bp reviewers to convince them to
> dedicate attention to their first bp. The risk is that the reviewers of
> Blueprints risk of becoming a sort of gatekeeper, or what other projects
> call 'committers'.
> 
> I think this is a concrete risk, it exists but I don't know if it's
> possible to eliminate it. I don't think we have to eliminate it but we
> need to manage it to minimize it in order to keep our promise of being
> 'open' as in open to new contributors, even the ones with low karma.
> 
> What do you think?

I think you're right, but it's actually no different than things have
been in the past.  It's just blueprints better reflecting how things
actually work.

However, people that have a proven track record of producing high
quality work are going to have an easier time getting attention, because
it takes less work overall to get their patches in.  With that said, if
the blueprint is good, it should get priority based on its merit, even
if the submitter has lower karma in the community.

Where we seem to hit the most friction is actually when merit alone
doesn't grant higher priority (only relevant to a small number of users,
for example), and submitter hasn't built up karma, either.  Those are
the ones that have a hard time, but it's not that surprising.

-- 
Russell Bryant



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