Open Stack

Excerpts from Flavio Percoco's message of 2015-02-12 00:13:35 -0800:
> On 11/02/15 09:37 -0800, Clint Byrum wrote:
> >Excerpts from Stefano Maffulli's message of 2015-02-11 06:14:39 -0800:
> >> On Wed, 2015-02-11 at 10:55 +0100, Flavio Percoco wrote:
> >> > This email is dedicated to the openness of our community/project.
> >>
> >> It's good to have a reminder every now and then. Thank you Flavio for
> >> caring enough to notice bad patterns and for raising a flag.
> >>
> >> > ## Keep discussions open
> >> >
> >> > I don't believe there's anything wrong about kicking off some
> >> > discussions in private channels about specs/bugs. I don't believe
> >> > there's anything wrong in having calls to speed up some discussions.
> >> > HOWEVER, I believe it's *completely* wrong to consider those private
> >> > discussions sufficient.
> >> [...]
> >>
> >> Well said. Conversations can happen anywhere and any time, but they
> >> should stay in open and accessible channels. Consensus needs to be built
> >> and decisions need to be shared, agreed upon by the community at large
> >> (and mailing lists are the most accessible media we have).
> >>
> >> That said, it's is very hard to generalize and I'd rather deal/solve
> >> specific examples. Sometimes, I'm sure there are episodes when a fast
> >> decision was needed and a limited amount of people had to carry the
> >> burden of responsibility. Life is hard, software development is hard and
> >> general rules sometimes need to be adapted to the reality. Again, too
> >> much generalization here for what I'm confortable with.
> >>
> >> Maybe it's worth repeating that I'm personally (and in my role)
> >> available to listen and mediate in cases when communication seems to
> >> happen behind closed doors. If you think something unhealthy is
> >> happening, talk to me (confidentiality assured).
> >>
> >> > ## Mailing List vs IRC Channel
> >> >
> >> > I get it, our mailing list is freaking busy, keeping up with it is
> >> > hard and time consuming and that leads to lots of IRC discussions.
> >>
> >> Not sure I agree with the causality but, the facts are those: traffic on
> >> the list and on IRC is very high (although not increasing anymore
> >> [1][2]).
> >>
> >> >  I
> >> > don't think there's anything wrong with that but I believe it's wrong
> >> > to expect *EVERYONE* to be in the IRC channel when those discussions
> >> > happen.
> >>
> >> Email is hard, I have the feeling that the vast majority of people use
> >> bad (they all suck, no joke) email clients. Lots and lots of email is
> >> even worse. Most contributors commit very few patches: the investment
> >> for them to configure their MUA to filter our traffic is too high.
> >>
> >> I have added more topics today to the openstack-dev list[3]. Maybe,
> >> besides filtering on the receiving end, we may spend some time
> >> explaining how to use mailman topics? I'll draft something on Ask, it
> >> may help those that have limited interest in OpenStack.
> >>
> >> What else can we do to make things better?
> >>
> >
> >I am one of those people who has a highly optimized MUA for mailing list
> >reading. It is still hard. Even with one keypress to kill threads from
> >view forever, and full text index searching, I still find it takes me
> >an hour just to filter the "don't want to see" from the "want to see"
> >threads each day.
> >
> >The filtering on the list-server side I think is not known by everybody,
> >and it might be a good idea to socialize it even more, and maybe even
> >invest in making the UI for it really straight forward for people to
> >use.
> >
> >That said, even if you just choose [all], and [yourproject], some
> >[yourproject] tags are pretty busy.
> 
> Would it be helpful if we share our email clients configs so that
> others can use them? I guess we could have a section for this in the
> wiki page.
> 
> I'm sure each one of us has his/her own server-side filters so, I
> guess we could start with those.
> 

Great idea Flavio. I went ahead and created a github repository with my
sup-mail hook which tags everything with openstack-dev. The mail client
itself is where most of the magic happens, but being able to read "all
the openstack-dev things" and then "all the not openstack-dev things"
is quite important to my email workflow.

I called the repository "FERK" for "Firehose Email Reading Kit". I'm
happy to merge pull requests if people want to share their other email
client configurations and also things like procmail filters.

https://github.com/SpamapS/ferk