[openstack-dev] The Evolution of core developer to maintainer?

Joshua Harlow harlowja at outlook.com
Wed Apr 1 17:41:47 UTC 2015


Duncan Thomas wrote:
>
>
> On 1 April 2015 at 10:04, Joshua Harlow <harlowja at outlook.com
> <mailto:harlowja at outlook.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     +1 to this. There will always be people who will want to work on fun
>     stuff and those who don't; it's the job of leadership in the
>     community to direct people if they can (but also the same job of
>     that leadership to understand that they can't direct everyone; it is
>     open-source after all and saying 'no' to people just makes them run
>     to some other project that doesn't do this...).
>
>     IMHO (and a rant probably better for another thread) but I've seen
>     to many projects/specs/split-outs (ie, scheduler tweaks, constraint
>     solving scheduler...) get abandoned because of cores saying this or
>     that is the priority right now (and this in all honesty pisses me
>     off); I don't feel this is right (cores should be leaders and
>     guides, not dictators); if a core is going to tell anyone that then
>     they better act as a guide to the person they are telling that to
>     and make sure they lead that person they just told "no"; after all
>     any child can say "no" but it takes a real man/woman to go the extra
>     distance...
>
>
> So I think saying no is sometimes a vital part of the core team's role,
> keeping up code quality and vision is really hard to do while new
> features are flooding in, and doing architectural reworking while
> features are merging is an epic task. There are also plenty of features
> that don't necessarily fit the shared vision of the project; just
> because we can do something doesn't mean we should. For example: there
> are plenty of companies trying to turn Openstack into a datacentre
> manager rather than a cloud (i.e. too much focus on pets .v. cattle
> style VMs), and I think we're right to push back against that.

Sure say 'no' but guide the person u just told to that to in a way that 
gets them to work on something that both of you find useful; just saying 
no and to 'shove off' (for lack of a better saying) IMHO isn't the right 
thing to do. It should IMHO be the responsibility of the person saying 
'no' to someone else (I guess this is the core team?) to man up and 
guide the person they said 'no' to (and not the other way around). I 
don't feel like this has happened though (but maybe I'm to much in my 
own little world).

>
> Right now there are some strong indications that there are areas we are
> very weak at (nova network still being preferred to neutron, the amount
> of difficultly people had establishing 3rd party CI setups for cinder)
> that really *should* be prioritised over new features.

Sure; I'm not gonna associate blame; but I feel like something hasn't 
worked out right and I start to look at the TC for some of this, butttt 
I'm not gonna go much deeper into this since blame is a bad thing to try 
to place (and doesn't really help make anything better)...

>
> That said, some projects can be worked on successfully in parallel with
> the main development - I suspect that a scheduler split out proposal is
> one of them. This doesn't need much/any buy-in from cores, it can be
> demonstrated in a fairly complete state before it is evaluated, so the
> only buyi-in needed is on the concept. This is a common development mode
> in the kernel world too.

Agreed.

>
>
> --
> Duncan Thomas
>
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