Open Stack

On 2018-08-22 00:17:41 +0000 (+0000), Fox, Kevin M wrote:
> There have been plenty of cross project goals set forth from the
> TC and implemented by the various projects such as wsgi or
> python3. Those have been worked on by each of the projects in
> priority to some project specific goals by devs interested in
> bettering OpenStack. Why is it so hard to believe if the TC gave
> out a request for a grander user/ops supporting feature, that the
> community wouldn't step up? PTL's are supposed to be neutral to
> vendor specific issues and work for the betterment of the Project.

Those goals, cross-project by nature, necessarily involve people
with domain-specific knowledge in the requisite projects. That is a
lot different than expecting Cinder developers to switch gears and
start working on Barbican instead just because the TC (or the UC, or
the OSF BoD, or whoever) decrees key management is prioritized over
multi-attach storage. Cross-project goal setting is already a
strained process, in which we as a community spend a _lot_ of time
and effort to determine what various project teams are even willing
to work on and prioritize alongside the things they already get
done. Asking them to work on something has absolutely not stopped
them from wanting to work on other things instead.

There are plenty of instances where the community (via its elected
leadership) has attempted to set goals and some teams have chosen to
work on other priorities of their own instead. If they could have
directed all their contributors to focus on that it would have been
completed, but they (all teams really) attempt balance the
priorities set by the OpenStack Technical Committee and other
leadership with their own project-specific priorities. Just as the
TC sinks a lot of effort into getting teams to focus on things it
identifies as priorities, the PTLs encounter similar challenges
getting their teams to focus on whatever priorities they've set as a
group. Some contributors only work on what interests them, some only
on what their employer tells them, and so on, while much of the rest
struggle simply to keep up with the overall rate of change.

> I don't buy the complexity argument either. Other non OpenStack
> projects are implementing similar functionality with far less
> complexity. I attribute a lot of that to difference in governence.
> Through governence we've made hard things much harder. They can't
> be fixed until the governence issues are fixed first I think.
[...]

Again, specifics would be nice. What decisions has the community
made in governing itself which have contributed to the problems you
see? What incremental changes would you make to improve that
situation (hint: blow-it-all-up suggestions like "get rid of PTLs"
aren't solutions when you're steering a community consisting of
thousands of developers, we need steps to get from point A to point
B)? In this _particular_ situation, what action are you asking the
TC or other community leaders to take to resolve the problem (and
what do you see as "the problem" in this case, for that matter)?
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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