[openstack-dev] [glance] The sorry state of our spec process

Flavio Percoco flavio at redhat.com
Wed Jul 1 13:49:25 UTC 2015


Greetings,

We're 1 week through L-2 (or is it 2?, I can't do time) and we, the
glance project, haven't even merged a single spec. Regardless of the
reasons behind this situation and the fact that we've been indeed
taking steps to improve this situation, I think we should put this
issue to an end.

There are many issues we've faced in Glance:

1. The glance-drivers team is too small [0]
2. Many specs have been held back waiting for code [1]
3. Huge expectations from the spec and very low review rate (even from
other members of the glance team).

There was a recent discussion on this m-l[2] about the spec process in
Nova and while I don't agree with everything that was said there, I do
think it highlights important problems that we're facing in glance as
well.

Therefore, I'd like to propose the following:

1. Expand our drivers team. I thik people in the glance community are
getting annoyed of reading this requests from me and "The Mythical
Man-Month" would agree with them. However, it's really sad that some
of our oldest (in terms of tenure) contributors that have shown
interest in joining the team haven't been added yet. I proposed to
bring all cores to the drivers team already and I still think that's a
good thing. Assuming that's something we don't want, then I'd like us
to find 2 or 3 people willing to volunteer for this task.

2. Lets try to get things into the backlog instead of expecting them
to be perfectly shaped and targeted for this release. Lets let people
start from  a base, generally agreed, idea so that code can be written
and reviews on the actual feature can be made. Once the feature is
implemented, we can move the spec to the release directory. I believe
this was also proposed in Nikola's thread[2].

3. Not all specs need to have 3-month-long discussions to be approved.
I'm not suggesting to just merge specs that are in poor state but we
can't always ask for code to understand whether a spec makes sense or
not.

Unfortunately, we're already in L-2 and I believe it'll be really hard
for some of those features to land in Liberty, which is also sad and
quite a waste of time.

I don't believe the above is the ultimate solution to this issue but I
believe it will help. For the next cycle, we really need to organize
this process differently.

The email is already long enough so, I hope we'll agree on something
and finally take some actions.

Cheers,
Flavio

[0] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/126550/
[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/admin/groups/342,members
(Mark Washenberger and Arnaud Legendre are not contributors anymore)
[2] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-June/067861.html


-- 
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco
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