Open Stack

Much as I dislike the overhead and the extra latency involved (now you need to have a review cycle for the spec plus the review cycle for the patch itself) I agreed with the `small features require small specs’.  The problem is that even a small change can have a big impact.  Forcing people to create a spec even for small features means that it’s very clear that the implications of the feature have been thought about and addressed.

Note that there is a similar issue with bugs.  I would expect that a patch to fix a bug would have to have a corresponding bug report.  Just accepting patches with no known justification seems like the wrong way to go.

--
Don Dugger
"Censeo Toto nos in Kansa esse decisse." - D. Gale
Ph: 303/443-3786

From: Dolph Mathews [mailto:dolph.mathews at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 1, 2014 11:02 AM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [all][specs] Please stop doing specs for any changes in projects

The argument has been made in the past that small features will require correspondingly small specs. If there's a counter-argument to this example (a "small" feature requiring a relatively large amount of spec effort), I'd love to have links to both the spec and the resulting implementation so we can discuss exactly why the spec was an unnecessary additional effort.
On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 10:30 AM, Jason Dunsmore <jason.dunsmore at rackspace.com<mailto:jason.dunsmore at rackspace.com>> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 30 2014, Joshua Harlow wrote:

> There is a balance here that needs to be worked out and I've seen
> specs start to turn into requirements for every single patch (even if
> the patch is pretty small). I hope we can rework the 'balance in the
> force' to avoid being so strict that every little thing requires a
> spec. This will not end well for us as a community.
>
> How have others thought the spec process has worked out so far? To
> much overhead, to little…?
>
> I personally am of the opinion that specs should be used for large
> topics (defining large is of course arbitrary); and I hope we find the
> right balance to avoid scaring everyone away from working with
> openstack. Maybe all of this is part of openstack maturing, I'm not
> sure, but it'd be great if we could have some guidelines around when
> is a spec needed and when isn't it and take it into consideration when
> requesting a spec that the person you have requested may get
> frustrated and just leave the community (and we must not have this
> happen) if you ask for it without explaining why and how clearly.

+1 I think specs are too much overhead for small features.  A set of
guidelines about when specs are needed would be sufficient.  Leave the
option about when to submit a design vs. when to submit code to the
contributor.

Jason

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