Open Stack

On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 9:46 PM Mohammed Naser <mnaser at vexxhost.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone:
>
> We're now in a spot where we have an increasing amount of projects
> that don't end up with a volunteer as PTL, even if the project has
> contributors .. no one wants to hold that responsibility alone for
> many reasons.  With time, the PTL role has become far more overloaded
> with many extra responsibilities than what we define in our charter:
>
>
> https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/charter.html#project-team-leads
>
> I think it's time to re-evaluate the project leadership model that we
> have.  I am thinking that perhaps it would make a lot of sense to move
> from a single PTL model to multiple maintainers.  This would leave it
> up to the maintainers to decide how they want to sort the different
> requirements/liaisons/contact persons between them.
>
> The above is just a very basic idea, I don't intend to diving much
> more in depth for now as I'd like to hear about what the rest of the
> community thinks.
>
> Thanks,
> Mohammed
>

Mine is an outsider's perspective, and I'm not sure if I should get
involved in case it is not well received.  But I can't get the thoughts out
of my head, so here goes; I hope something constructive can be taken from
this...

I write as someone whose interest over the last 2-3 years has just been to
keep a particular networking driver (Calico) working, as OpenStack master
moves along.

Doing that, my impression has been of an awful lot of churn, requiring
minor updates on my part, but delivering questionable benefit to OpenStack
users.  For example, in Neutron, there was the extended neutron-lib work,
and now we have networking-ovn moving into Neutron core.  (Which appears to
me - possibly insufficiently informed - as the opposite philosophical
direction from the neutron-lib and Neutron stadium efforts.)

As techies, we all (myself included) like refactoring our work to make it
more elegant, but in my experience that kind of activity can take over when
there are fewer real external needs to meet.

So, there's the proposal in this thread about PTLs, and separately there is
Thierry's RFC about some project consolidation.  Very broadly speaking, if
feels to me that the consolidation is what OpenStack really needs, and in
relation to the kind of churn that I've mentioned,
- it feels like consolidation would correctly curtail that back, as
consolidated projects would - I think - naturally review the real external
needs within their new wider scope
- it feels like reducing PTL authority would encourage that kind of churn
activity, as there wouldn't necessarily be anyone within a project to give
a more strategic lead.

So for me I guess this thread feels like the wrong answer, and it's
disappointing that there hasn't been more engagement with the consolidation
idea.

Best wishes,
    Neil
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