[tc] [election] Candidate question: growth of projects

Sylvain Bauza sbauza at redhat.com
Thu Feb 21 14:09:11 UTC 2019


Hola,

Thanks for this question.

On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 12:19 PM Chris Dent <cdent+os at anticdent.org> wrote:

>
> This is another set of questions for TC candidates, to look at a
> different side of things from my first one [1] and somewhat related
> to the one Doug has asked [2].
>
> As Doug mentions, a continuing role of the TC is to evaluate
> applicants to be official projects. These questions are about that.
>
> There are 63 teams in the official list of projects. How do you feel
> about this size? Too big, too small, just right? Why?
>
>
IMHO, the size is never a problem. The real question is rather about
whether all of them are going to the same direction (and I'm trying hard to
not make a parallel with geopolitics).
Oh, I'm not saying we don't have problems with 63 teams, right? At least,
having this number of teams is a bit difficult because it's more difficult
to know about all of them but just a small number (say 12)
It also means that it's somehow difficult to work on the same page of
course.

So, what to do with those problems ? Maybe the TC should be more governing
this list, by at least making sure that all projects run at the same page.
We have a maintenance tag. It's a very difficult tag to assign, right?
Maybe it's time for us to be discussing about what it means for a project
to be 'maintained'.



If you had to make a single declaration about growth in the number
> of projects would you prefer to see (and why, of course):
>
> * More projects as required by demand.
> * Slower or no growth to focus on what we've got.
> * Trim the number of projects to "get back to our roots".
> * Something else.
>
>
My statement would be "focus on the existing projects, define a common set
of attributes that would necessarly be more strict than today and see if
and how all the current projects can fill the gaps for all of them".
Somehow tied to the 2nd proposal you make, but not by principe, just
pragmatism in order to help our users to have a decent experience.
That said, I'm not opposed to accepting new candidates if those are able to
cope with all the necessary tasks. We had an incubation process early in
OpenStack, that could be an idea for those new projects to get approved.


> How has the relatively recent emergence of the open infrastructure
> projects that are at the same "level" in the Foundation as OpenStack
> changed your thoughts on the above questions?
>
>
Not really. I don't see this as a threat for OpenStack and I think it's
good for the Foundation to evolve. But it will come with challenges, the
first being the integration process with the approval checklist.
The only problem I see is that while granting a project is easy, calling
the cut is very hard. The more we are clear on the requirements, the less
we could be disappointed in the future.


Do you think the number of projects has any impact (positive or
> negative) on our overall ability to get things done?
>
>
I'll restate here what I already said in another thread : I just don't
think the TC role is about to drive architectural designs. Getting the shXt
done is the matter of projects and individuals that are able to get some
time for this.
What the TC is good at is to make those projects and contributors to
communicate. We're far away from a BDFL model where a couple of people
decide for all the community. If we really want to have things done, just
make people discussing and act as a mediator.

Recognizing that there are many types of contributors, not just
> developers, this question is about developers: Throughout history
> different members of the community have sometimes identified as an
> "OpenStack developer", sometimes as a project developer (e.g., "Nova
> developer"). Should we encourage contributors to think of themselves
> as primarily OpenStack developers? If so, how do we do that? If not,
> why not?
>
>
Good question. I don't think that people claiming to be "Project X
developer" misconsider other projects, so it's not really a qualitative
aspect.
It's more the fact that most of the day-to-day work is made within a single
project, so most of the social traction is made there.
Also, I don't think forcing developers to consider themselves "OpenStack
developers" will change anything. We should rather ask ourselves "How can
we make the larger community of developers to share the same vision and
pace ?".

-Sylvain

Thanks.
>
> [1]
> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-discuss/2019-February/002914.html
> [2]
> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-discuss/2019-February/002923.html
>
>
> --
> Chris Dent                       ٩◔̯◔۶           https://anticdent.org/
> freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent
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