Open Stack

On Tue, 2014-12-23 at 12:06 -0600, Kyle Mestery wrote:
> My concern is I don't understand why this discussion would not happen
> with the broader project, which is on the openstack-dev list, IRC
> meetings, and in gerrit. Is there a reason any of those three things
> won't work? 

Important question, worth a separate subject.

The Development mailing list averages over 600 messages per week [1],
from over 200 different people: managing that traffic is very hard,
requires dedication and attention. I have identified three major sets of
ATCs: core, regular and casual
http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/ 

Today we have:

- Core (contribute up to 80% of integrated+incubated code): 254
- Regular (contribute up to 90% of integrated+incubated code): 589
- Casual (contribute the remaining 10%): 1,956

I expect that core ATCs read and participate in openstack-dev, a part of
regulars do too but the Casual contributors IMO are not
reading/participating much. In my experience very few contributors have
the skills *and* motivation to process such traffic effectively. Most
contributors simply miss *a lot* of messages on the list because they
can't (or don't know how to) manage high traffic email lists. The vast
majority of Active Technical Contributors have no time/resources to
process traffic on -dev.

This means that managers of casual ATCs, which I expect this group is
largely made of, have even less time/capabilities to follow -dev.

A new group cannot really emerge and identify itself as a group inside
another huge, trafficked channel. One reason for this mailing list is
for this working group to establish itself.

Besides the size of the -dev list, the topics discussed among devs are
different than those discussed by the product/project managers in this
WG: devs discuss engineering issues, like API stabilizations,
versioning, interfaces etc. For this group the main topics are future
roadmap, customer's impact and requests ...

Operators have had a separate channel for a long time and have
established themselves as a distinct group and learned how to engage
with developers. The hope is that this group learns that too soon.

> And if so, what is the purpose of the discussions here? Is it more of
> just communicating changes? Call me honestly confused.

Neutron's splitting of services and plugins is the sort of change that
will affect equally core, regular and occasional contributors: core ATCs
probably know all about it, a part of regulars also know enough but
occasional and a part of regular don't know what that means for their
bottom line. 

What will happen to products based on Neutron? How will that affect
their sales/marketing? What are the governance/legal implications for
the new repositories? What does that mean for defcore and openstack
trademarks? I don't think that these questions can be raised and debated
successfully anywhere else.

/stef


[1]
http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/repository.html?repository=http%3A__lists.openstack.org_pipermail_openstack-dev&ds=mls