Open Stack

James Polley wrote:
> 
>     > However, Thierry pointed
>     > to https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Foundation/Structure
>     which
>     > still refers to Project Technical Leads and says explicitly that they
>     > lead individual projects, not programs. I actually have edit access to
>     > that page, so I could at least update that with a simple
>     > "s/Project/Program/", if I was sure that was the right thing to do.
> 
>     Don't underestimate how stale wiki pages can become! Yes, fix it.
> 
> I don't know if I've fixed it, but I've certainly replaced all users of
> the word Project with Program.
> 
> Whether or not it now matches reality, I'm not sure.
> 
> I alsp removed (what I assume is) a stale reference to the PPB and added
> a new heading for the TC.

It looks correct to me, thanks!

>     > http://www.openstack.org/ has a link in the bottom nav that says
>     > "Projects"; it points to http://www.openstack.org/projects/ which
>     > redirects to http://www.openstack.org/software/ which has a list of
>     > things like "Compute" and "Storage" - which as far as I know are
>     > Programs, not Projects. I don't know how to update that link in
>     the nav
>     > panel.
> 
>     That's because the same word ("compute") is used for two different
>     things: a program name ("Compute") and an "official OpenStack name" for
>     a project ("OpenStack Compute a.k.a. Nova"). Basically official
>     OpenStack names reduce confusion for newcomers ("What is Nova ?"), but
>     they confuse old-timers at some point ("so the Compute program produces
>     Nova a.k.a. OpenStack Compute ?").
> 
> 
> That's confusing to me. I had thought that part of the reason for the
> separation was to enable a level of indirection - if the Compute program
> team decide that a new project called (for example) SuperNova should be
> the main project, that just means that Openstack Compute is now a
> pointer to a different project, supported by the same program team.
> 
> It sounds like that isn't the intent though?

That's more of a side-effect than the intent, IMHO. The indirection we
created is between teams and code repositories.

>     > I wasn't around when the original Programs/Projects discussion was
>     > happening - which, I suspect, has a lot to do with why I'm confused
>     > today - it seems as though people who were around at the time
>     understand
>     > the difference, but people who have joined since then are relying on
>     > multiple conflicting verbal definitions. I believe, though,
>     > that
>     http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2013-June/010821.html
>     > was one of the earliest starting points of the discussion. That page
>     > points at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Projects, which today
>     contains
>     > a list of Programs. That page does have a definition of what a Program
>     > is, but doesn't explain what a Project is or how they relate to
>     > Programs. This page seems to be locked down, so I can't edit it.
> 
>     https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Projects was renamed to
>     https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Programs with the wiki helpfully leaving
>     a redirect behind. So the content you are seeing here is the "Programs"
>     wiki page, which is why it doesn't define "projects".
> 
>     We don't really use the word "project" that much anymore, we prefer to
>     talk about code repositories. Programs are teams working on a set of
>     code repositories. Some of those code repositories may appear in the
>     integrated release.
> 
> This explanation of the difference between projects and programs sounds
> like it would be useful to add to /Programs - but I can't edit that page. 

This page reflects the official list of programs, which is why it's
protected. it's supposed to be replaced by an automatic publication from
http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/governance/tree/reference/programs.yaml
which is the ultimate source of truth on that topic.

>     [1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ProjectTypes
> 
> I *can* edit that page; I'd like to bring it up-to-date. It seems like a
> good basis for explaining the difference between Programs and Projects
> and the historical reasons for the split. I'll aim to take a stab at
> this next week.

Please feel free to do so, however that page is really an artifact of
the old way we were structured, and is therefore useful as an historic
leftover :) It's not linked from anywhere those days. Maybe you should
create a new page, like
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Projects_vs_Programs ? What you want to
talk about is not really about "Project Types" anyway.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)