Open Stack

On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 12:13:04PM -0600, John Griffith wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 11:29 AM, Ben Swartzlander <ben at swartzlander.org>
> wrote:
> 
> > I've always thought it was a bit strange to require new drivers to merge
> > by milestone 1. I think I understand the motivations of the policy. The
> > main motivation was to free up reviewers to review "other things" and this
> > policy guarantees that for 75% of the release reviewers don't have to
> > review new drivers. The other motivation was to prevent vendors from
> > turning up at the last minute with crappy drivers that needed a ton of
> > work, by encouraging them to get started earlier, or forcing them to wait
> > until the next cycle.
> >
> 
> ​Yep, these were some of the ideas behind it but the first milestone did
> for sure create some consequences.​
> 
> 
> >
> > I believe that the deadline actually does more harm than good.
> >
> 
> ​In retrospect I'd agree with you on this.  We ended up spending our major
> focus for the first milestone on nothing but drivers which I think looking
> back wasn't so good.  But to be fair, we try things, see how they work,
> revisit and move on.  Which is the plan last I checked (there's a proposal
> to talk about some of this at the summit in Tokyo).​
> 

We will have more discussion on this for sure, but I figure I should
chime in with some of my thoughts.

I definitely do want to reconsider our deadlines. There are going to
be challenges no matter what point in the cycle we set for things like
driver submissions, but as John said, we need to try things and see how
it works. I saw a lot of logic in moving new drivers to the first
milestone, but I don't think it worked out as well as we had hoped it
would.

The biggest problem I see is it made the drivers a major focus for the
first part of the cycle. It seemed to me that that distracted a lot of
focus from core functionality. It got that part out of the way (mostly)
but it sort of disrupted the momentum from things discussed at the
Summit.

> 
> >
> > First of all, to those that don't want to spend time on driver reviews,
> > there are other solutions to that problem. Some people do want to review
> > the drivers, and those who don't can simply ignore them and spend time on
> > what they care about. I've heard people who spend time on driver reviews
> > say that the milestone-1 deadline doesn't mean they spend less time
> > reviewing drivers overall, it just all gets crammed into the beginning of
> > each release. It should be obvious that setting a deadline doesn't actually
> > affect the amount of reviewer effort, it just concentrates that effort.
> >
> 

I do think this is a very valid point.

I certainly don't have all the answers. I'm looking forward to the
discussions around this to get ideas of how to make things better. But I
do think we need to try something else to find a better way. Maybe we'll
end up back to where we are, but I do think it warrants more discussion.

Sean