Open Stack

On Sep 23, 2014, at 12:52 PM, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:

> Devananda van der Veen wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 8:40 AM, Doug Hellmann <doug at doughellmann.com> wrote:
>>> One is a technical discussion that has nothing at all to do with governance. The other is entirely about governance.
>>> 
>>> If we are no longer incubating *programs*, which are the teams of people who we would like to ensure are involved in OpenStack governance, then how do we make that decision? From a practical standpoint, how do we make a list of eligible voters for a TC election? Today we pull a list of committers from the git history from the projects associated with “official programs", but if we are dropping “official programs” we need some other way to build the list.
>> 
>> I don't think incubation ever applied to programs. Any program listed
>> in http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/governance/tree/reference/programs.yaml
>> is "official" and gets voting rights starting in the election after it
>> was added to that file.
> 
> I confirm there never was incubation for programs. The only thing that
> goes through incubation are projects that want to become part of the
> integrated release.

I’m having some trouble making my question clear. We’re getting hung up on terminology, and part of that is because I think I’m using old terms for describing things and their states of being under the proposed changed system. Let me try rephrasing my concern, but first let me frame the question by saying that whatever else we say it is, OpenStack is made of people. The proposal includes a number of relatively small changes that affect how those people work and what they work on, combined with  one big change to how we decide who those people are. I’m asking for more details about that big change.

While the proposal has many concrete components, it also is purposefully more vague on some points as a way to lower the barrier for defining new groups of contributors and creating new projects. I agree with many of those goals, but I think that some of the points on which the proposal is vague are important for us to spell out clearly before they can be implemented.

One such point is, how do new people — not their code, but the contributors themselves — obtain a status within the overall OpenStack project granting them the option of participating in our governance?

In the past, we have had formal votes by members of the Technical Committee to decide whether or not to accept new groups (at different times called projects and programs) as being official parts of the overall OpenStack project. There are guidelines for what standards those groups need to follow once they are official [1] and other guidelines for the software created by those groups at designated points in its lifecycle [2]. While I’m not finding a specific procedure documented the TC has historically voted on the official status of groups either in IRC meetings or using gerrit based on changes to files in the governance repository [3]. The request for a vote from the TC is usually initiated by a leader in the group asking for official status. The official status of the group, and the git repositories it manages, are used to build our community voter list, and that is why it is important to understand how the proposal we’re discussing is different from what we do now.

The “Who we are and what we all work on” section touches on this, but does not actually describe a process to be followed. The guidelines listed there seem easy to meet, but who decides if they actually are met for a given person or group of people? What, if any, expectations are placed on the group after they are given official status? What, if any, benefits come with the designation?

The proposal includes process changes, testing configuration changes, and feature proposals. Most of the items it covers are not related to governance, and evaluating them all together masks some of the more important aspects of the governance changes. We could just go change the way we define the integrated gate without changing anything else we do, for example. It would be easier to evaluate the proposed governance changes if they were a patch on the existing repository, leaving out all of the unrelated suggestions to be evaluated separately.

Doug


[1] http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/governance/tree/reference/new-programs-requirements.rst
[2] http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/governance/tree/reference/incubation-integration-requirements.rst
[3] http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/governance/tree/reference/programs.yaml

> 
>> I also don't think that Monty's proposal suggests that we drop
>> programs. I think it's suggesting the opposite -- we allow *more*
>> programs (and the projects associated with them) into the openstack/*
>> fold without requiring them to join the integrated gating of the
>> "layer #1" projects.
> 
> Although the proposal might make them so cheap we wouldn't need a formal
> word for them.
> 
> -- 
> Thierry Carrez (ttx)
> 
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