[openstack-dev] [tc][all] Big tent? (Related to Plugins for all)

Clint Byrum clint at fewbar.com
Tue Jul 19 22:28:22 UTC 2016


Excerpts from Fox, Kevin M's message of 2016-07-19 21:59:29 +0000:
> Yeah. I'm not saying any project has done it out of malice. Everyone's just doing whats best for their project. But it does not seem like there is an overarching entity watching over the whole or (pushing, encouraging, enticing, whatever words are appropriate here) projects to work on the commons anymore. It use to be that incubating projects were pushed to help the other projects integrate with them by the incubating project being strongly encouraged to write the integrations themselves as part of the incubation process. Now it seems like each project just spawns and then hopes someone else will do the legwork. Using the carrot of incubation to further the commons is not an ideal solution, but it was at least something.
> 
> Linux has an overarching entity, Linus for that task. He's there to make sure that someone is really paying attention to integration of the whole thing into a cohesive, usable whole. Sometimes he pushes back and makes sure commons work happens as part of features getting in to ensure commons work still gets done. I'm not advocating a benevolent dictator for OpenStack though.
> 
> But what I thought what the TC's job was, was benevolent dictators, which each subproject (or subsystem in linux terms) are required to give up final say to, so that sometimes the projects have to sacrifice a bit so that the whole can flourish and those benevolent dictators are elected for a time, by the OpenStack community. (Actually, I think  that kind of makes it a Democratic Republic... but I digress) Maybe I misunderstood what the TC's about. But I think we still do need some folks elected by the community to be involved in making sure OpenStack as a whole has a cohesive technical architecture that actually addresses user problems and that have some power to to stop the "this feature belongs in this project", "no, it belongs in that project", "no, lets spawn 3 new projects to cover that case" kinds of things, make the difficult decision, and ask a project to help the community out by going along with "a solution" and we all can move on. Critical features have been stuck 
>  in this space for years and OpenStacks competitors have had solutions for years. 

You're right, this is the TC's job. However, the TC does it more by
exception, rather than by default. So while Linus and the subsystem
leaders in the kernel look after changes in general, the TC is there to
catch things that bubble out of the processes in place. So, I think the
TC needs contributors to bring _specific_ things that need to be handled,
and they will. They're just not going to be able to stand at the gate
and review every spec... this process only scales to the velocity and
breadth that OpenStack has if we get contributors involved.



More information about the OpenStack-dev mailing list