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