[openstack-dev] The Evolution of core developer to maintainer?

Doug Wiegley dougwig at parksidesoftware.com
Wed Apr 1 16:03:49 UTC 2015


> On Apr 1, 2015, at 3:52 AM, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:
> 
> Joe Gordon wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 5:46 PM, Dean Troyer <dtroyer at gmail.com
>> <mailto:dtroyer at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>>    On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 5:30 PM, Joe Gordon <joe.gordon0 at gmail.com
>>    <mailto:joe.gordon0 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>>        Do you feel like a core deveper/reviewer (we initially called
>>        them core developers) [1]:
>> 
>>            In OpenStack a core developer is a developer who has
>>            submitted enough high quality code and done enough code
>>            reviews that we trust their code reviews for merging into
>>            the base source tree. It is important that we have a process
>>            for active developers to be added to the core developer team.
>> 
>>        Or a maintainer [1]:
>> 
>>            1. They share responsibility in the project’s success.
>>            2. They have made a long-term, recurring time investment to
>>            improve the project.
>>            3. They spend that time doing whatever needs to be done, not
>>            necessarily what is the most interesting or fun.
>> 
>>    First, I don't think these two things are mutually exclusive, that's
>>    a false dichotomy.  They sound like two groups of attributes (or
>>    roles), both of which must be earned in the eyes of the rest of the
>>    project team.  Frankly, being a PTL is your maintainer list on
>>    steroids for some projects, except that the PTL is directly elected.
> 
> +1000
> 
>> Yes, these are not orthogonal ideas. The question should be rephrased to
>> 'which description do you identify the most with: core
>> developer/reviewer or maintainer?'
> 
> - Some people are core reviewers and maintainers (or "drivers", to reuse
> the openstack terminology we already have for that)
> - Some people are core reviewers only (because they can't commit 90% of
> their work time to work on project priorities)
> - Some people are maintainers/drivers only (because their project duties
> don't give them enough time to also do reviewing)
> - Some people are casual developers / reviewers (because they can't
> spend more than 30% of their day on project stuff)

That's a nice, concise list.  I like that.

> 
> All those people are valuable. Simply renaming "core reviewers" to
> "maintainers" (creating a single super-developer class) just excludes
> valuable people.

I don't care about the name, but... It's been interesting to watch reactions to the naming thing, because some folks see "maintainer" as an "upgrade", and some don't, and it's easy to tell what someone's reaction will be simply by the bias they're bringing to that word. I'd like to see in the text of any of the proposals where it actually advocates a "super developer", because I'm not seeing it, and the constant repeating of this meme isn't helping.

Thanks,
doug


> 
> -- 
> Thierry Carrez (ttx)
> 
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