Open Stack

Excerpts from Stefano Maffulli's message of 2013-11-15 09:12:05 -0800:
> On 11/15/2013 02:06 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> > Arguments in favor of splitting openstack-dev / stackforge-dev
> > * People can easily filter out all non-openstack discussions
> > * Traffic would drop by about 25%
> 
> I'm not so convinced about this figure, as others pointed out.
> 
> > * Removes confusion as to which projects are actually "in openstack"
> > 
> > Arguments in favor of keeping it the same
> > * Provides a cross-pollination forum where external projects can learn
> > * More chaos creates more innovation
> 
> chaos creates just chaos in this context :) I don't buy Clint's rhetoric
> applied to this case :)
> 

You say that like chaos is all bad. The trade-off is that the chaos
create's chain reactions often leading to _more_ energy being released.
This is not always the most efficient use of energy, but it does unlock
energy that may never have been realized. I have to wonder if Mistral
would have been created the way it was if TaskFlow discussions were
divided between the "core" list and stackforge list.

I think this is rather interesting, that we are debating how to scale a
list of "compute" nodes that we call developers by effectively creating
"cells". We all know that this only solves one problem and now creates
another one. One cell can still be overloaded. The balance between the
two is simply not going to hold true.

Perhaps the answer is instead to look at why the compute nodes feel that
they need to look at every single broadcast topic. Are we all using
horrible email clients (probably, because all email clients are
horrible) or are we just inept? Could we benefit from some training on
this subject? Better tools? A cultural acceptance that some people will
likely miss some messages?

> Anyway, I've looked at my folder and it looks like 90% of the messages
> to openstack-dev have topics in the subject line. Filtering on the
> client side should be easy to do and I'd like to have a few volunteers
> run an experiment over one week to see if filters can ease the pain.
>

I don't filter at all. I use sup-mail, which is an unmaintained ruby
based client like notmuch that has one benefit worth using an unmaintained
ruby anything. It very easily allows "killing" threads without deleting
them. This means that as soon as I see a subject line is not interesting,
I press & on the thread, and it is gone from my view. Until I do a local
search with '\', which then searches the local xapian index and may show
killed threads. Neat huh?  This may be why I don't favor splitting,
because I don't get overwhelmed by long threads.. they're gone 1 or 2
messages in.

I'm not suggesting that everybody switch to sup. But rather that we try
to investigate why the list is overwhelming people before we just split
it in two, which I do believe will have large unintended and difficult
to detect consequences.

> I'd also like to get to an agreement that support requests sent to
> openstack-dev should not be answered and instead should be redirected
> gently to openstack at lists. and/or ask.openstack.org.
> 

My general sense is that this is already happening.