Open Stack

Clint Byrum wrote:
>> [...]
>> But what I thought what the TC's job was, was benevolent dictators, which each subproject (or subsystem in linux terms) are required to give up final say to, so that sometimes the projects have to sacrifice a bit so that the whole can flourish and those benevolent dictators are elected for a time, by the OpenStack community. (Actually, I think  that kind of makes it a Democratic Republic... but I digress) Maybe I misunderstood what the TC's about. But I think we still do need some folks elected by the community to be involved in making sure OpenStack as a whole has a cohesive technical architecture that actually addresses user problems and that have some power to to stop the "this feature belongs in this project", "no, it belongs in that project", "no, lets spawn 3 new projects to cover that case" kinds of things, make the difficult decision, and ask a project to help the community out by going along with "a solution" and we all can move on. Critical features have been stu
 ck
>>   in this space for years and OpenStacks competitors have had solutions for years.
>
> You're right, this is the TC's job. However, the TC does it more by
> exception, rather than by default. So while Linus and the subsystem
> leaders in the kernel look after changes in general, the TC is there to
> catch things that bubble out of the processes in place. So, I think the
> TC needs contributors to bring _specific_ things that need to be handled,
> and they will. They're just not going to be able to stand at the gate
> and review every spec... this process only scales to the velocity and
> breadth that OpenStack has if we get contributors involved.

It's always a balancing act -- we want the TC to keep an eye on the big 
picture, provide guidance, encourage convergence, and stop the bucket 
when needed. At the same time, developers don't want a set of people 
that do not have specific experience in a their project to constantly 
interfere with project development with random mandates.

However, I'd agree that the pendulum currently is still in the "not 
enough" territory rather than in the "too much" territory. We have a 
number of initiatives brewing though (clarifying principles, defining 
release goals, release stewards, architecture WG, PTG event...) which I 
think will improve things in the right direction, let's see how those 
pan out. Please be patient while we are rolling those out.

So in summary: yes there still are issues, but it is not a simple 
problem, and we are working on it.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)