[openstack-dev] [all][tc] Moving away from "big tent" terminology

Shake Chen shake.chen at gmail.com
Thu Jun 15 10:13:14 UTC 2017


+1000
very clearly.

On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 6:04 PM, Dmitry Tantsur <dtantsur at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 06/15/2017 11:56 AM, Neil Jerram wrote:
>
>> Just an immediate reaction: to me "OpenStack-Hosted projects" is not very
>> distinct from "OpenStack projects".  So with that terminology I think there
>> will still be confusion (perhaps more).
>>
>
> This was my reaction as well. For people who misunderstood official vs
> unofficial, this is going to pose an even bigger challenge, I'm afraid.
>
>
>> (Or did I misunderstand your new proposal?)
>>
>> Regards - Neil
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 10:16 AM Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org
>> <mailto:thierry at openstack.org>> wrote:
>>
>>     Hi everyone,
>>
>>     Back in 2014, OpenStack was facing a problem. Our project structure,
>>     inherited from days where Nova, Swift and friends were the only game
>> in
>>     town, was not working anymore. The "integrated release" that we ended
>> up
>>     producing was not really integrated, already too big to be installed
>> by
>>     everyone, and yet too small to accommodate the growing interest in
>> other
>>     forms of "open infrastructure". The incubation process (from
>> stackforge
>>     to incubated, from incubated to integrated) created catch-22s that
>>     prevented projects from gathering enough interest to reach the upper
>>     layers. Something had to give.
>>
>>     The project structure reform[1] that resulted from those discussions
>>     switched to a simpler model: project teams would be approved based on
>>     how well they fit the OpenStack overall mission and community
>>     principles, rather than based on a degree of maturity. It was
>> nicknamed
>>     "the big tent" based on a blogpost[2] that Monty wrote -- mostly
>>     explaining that things produced by the OpenStack community should be
>>     considered OpenStack projects.
>>
>>     So the reform removed the concept of incubated vs. integrated, in
>> favor
>>     of a single "official" category. Tags[3] were introduced to better
>>     describe the degree of maturity of the various official things. "Being
>>     part of the big tent" was synonymous to "being an official project"
>> (but
>>     people kept saying the former).
>>
>>     At around the same time, mostly for technical reasons around the
>>     difficulty of renaming git repositories, the "stackforge/" git
>>     repository prefix was discontinued (all projects hosted on OpenStack
>>     infrastructure would be created under an "openstack/" git repository
>>     prefix).
>>
>>     All those events combined, though, sent a mixed message, which we are
>>     still struggling with today. "Big tent" has a flea market connotation
>> of
>>     "everyone can come in". Combined with the fact that all git
>> repositories
>>     are under the same prefix, it created a lot of confusion. Some people
>>     even think the big tent is the openstack/ namespace, not the list of
>>     official projects. We tried to stop using the "big tent" meme, but (I
>>     blame Monty), the name is still sticking. I think it's time to more
>>     aggressively get rid of it. We tried using "unofficial" and "official"
>>     terminology, but that did not stick either.
>>
>>     I'd like to propose that we introduce a new concept: "OpenStack-Hosted
>>     projects". There would be "OpenStack projects" on one side, and
>>     "Projects hosted on OpenStack infrastructure" on the other side (all
>>     still under the openstack/ git repo prefix). We'll stop saying
>> "official
>>     OpenStack project" and "unofficial OpenStack project". The only
>>     "OpenStack projects" will be the official ones. We'll chase down the
>>     last mentions of "big tent" in documentation and remove it from our
>>     vocabulary.
>>
>>     I think this new wording (replacing what was previously Stackforge,
>>     replacing what was previously called "unofficial OpenStack projects")
>>     will bring some clarity as to what is OpenStack and what is beyond it.
>>
>>     Thoughts ?
>>
>>     [1]
>>     https://governance.openstack.org/tc/resolutions/20141202-pro
>> ject-structure-reform-spec.html
>>     [2] http://inaugust.com/posts/big-tent.html
>>     [3] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/tags/index.html
>>
>>     --
>>     Thierry Carrez (ttx)
>>
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>>
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-- 
Shake Chen
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