Open Stack

Several folks on this thread have talked about the different constituencies and problems we’re trying to solve with naming. Most of the people following this thread understand all of the terminology and governance we’ve defined, but that's still a very small percentage of people who care about OpenStack at the end of the day. I think we’re trying to communicate to the 99% who have relatively low context: potential users, people in other open source communities, managers at vendor companies, press/analysts, etc. who really want to know what we’re doing, but feel overwhelmed and need a simple structure interpret it.

Two things we should address:

1) Make it more clear which projects are “officially” part of OpenStack. It’s possible to find that information, but it’s not obvious. I am one of the people who laments the demise of stackforge…it was very clear that stackforge projects were not official, but part of the OpenStack ecosystem. I wish it could be resurrected, but I know that’s impractical. 

To make this actionable...Github is just a mirror of our repositories, but for better or worse it's the way most people in the world explore software. If you look at OpenStack on Github now, it’s impossible to tell which projects are official. Maybe we could help by better curating the Github projects (pinning some of the top projects, using the new new topics feature to put tags like openstack-official or openstack-unofficial, coming up with more standard descriptions or naming, etc.). Same goes for our repos…if there’s a way we could differentiate between official and unofficial projects on this page it would be really useful: https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/

2) Create a simple structure within the official set of projects to provide focus and a place to get started. The challenge (again to our success, and lots of great work by the community) is that even the official project set is too big for most people to follow. 

While I fully admit it was an imperfect system, the three tier delineation of “integrated," “incubated" and “stackforge" was something folks could follow pretty easily. The tagging and mapping is valuable and provides additional detail, but having the three clear buckets is ideal.  I would like to see us adopt a similar system, even if the names change (i.e. core infrastructure services, optional services, stackforge). Happy to throw out ideas if there is interest.

Thanks,
Lauren


> On Jun 21, 2017, at 11:42 AM, Chris Hoge <chris at openstack.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jun 21, 2017, at 9:20 AM, Clark Boylan <cboylan at sapwetik.org <mailto:cboylan at sapwetik.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> On Wed, Jun 21, 2017, at 08:48 AM, Dmitry Tantsur wrote:
>>> On 06/19/2017 05:42 PM, Chris Hoge wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Jun 15, 2017, at 5:57 AM, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org <mailto:thierry at openstack.org>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Sean Dague wrote:
>>>>>> [...]
>>>>>> I think those are all fine. The other term that popped into my head was
>>>>>> "Friends of OpenStack" as a way to describe the openstack-hosted efforts
>>>>>> that aren't official projects. It may be too informal, but I do think
>>>>>> the OpenStack-Hosted vs. OpenStack might still mix up in people's head.
>>>>> 
>>>>> My original thinking was to call them "hosted projects" or "host
>>>>> projects", but then it felt a bit incomplete. I kinda like the "Friends
>>>>> of OpenStack" name, although it seems to imply some kind of vetting that
>>>>> we don't actually do.
>>>> 
>>>> Why not bring back the name Stackforge and apply that
>>>> to unofficial projects? It’s short, descriptive, and unambiguous.
>>> 
>>> Just keep in mind that people always looked at stackforge projects as
>>> "immature 
>>> experimental projects". I remember getting questions "when is
>>> ironic-inspector 
>>> going to become a real project" because of our stackforge prefix back
>>> then, even 
>>> though it was already used in production.
>> 
>> A few days ago I suggested a variant of Thierry's suggestion below. Get
>> rid of the 'openstack' prefix entirely for hosting and use stackforge
>> for everything. Then officially governed OpenStack projects are hosted
>> just like any other project within infra under the stackforge (or Opium)
>> name. The problem with the current "flat" namespace is that OpenStack
>> means something specific and we have overloaded it for hosting. But we
>> could flip that upside down and host OpenStack within a different flat
>> namespace that represented "project hosting using OpenStack infra
>> tooling”.
> 
> I dunno. I understand that it’s extra work to have two namespaces,
> but it sends a clear message. Approved TC, UC, and Board projects
> remain under openstack, and unofficial move to a name that is not
> openstack (i.e. stackforge/opium/etc).
> 
> As part of a branding exercise, it creates a clear, easy to
> understand, and explain division.
> 
> For names like stackforge being considered a pejorative, we can
> work as a community against that. I know that when I was helping run
> the puppet modules under stackforge, I was proud of the work and
> understood it to mean that it was a community supported, but not
> official project. I was pretty sad when stackforge went away, precisely
> because of the confusion we’re experiencing with ‘big tent’ today.
> 
> 
>> The hosting location isn't meant to convey anything beyond the project
>> is hosted on a Gerrit run by infra and tests are run by Zuul.
>> stackforge/ is not an (anti)endorsement (and neither is openstack/).
>> 
>> Unfortunately, I expect that doing this will also result in a bunch of
>> confusion around "why is OpenStack being renamed", "what is happening to
>> OpenStack governance", etc.
>> 
>>>>> An alternative would be to give "the OpenStack project infrastructure"
>>>>> some kind of a brand name (say, "Opium", for OpenStack project
>>>>> infrastructure ultimate madness) and then call the hosted projects
>>>>> "Opium projects". Rename the Infra team to Opium team, and voilà!
>>>>> -- 
>>>>> Thierry Carrez (ttx)
>> 
>> Clark
>> 
>> __________________________________________________________________________
>> OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
>> Unsubscribe: OpenStack-dev-request at lists.openstack.org <mailto:OpenStack-dev-request at lists.openstack.org>?subject:unsubscribe
>> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev <http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev>
> __________________________________________________________________________
> OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
> Unsubscribe: OpenStack-dev-request at lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/attachments/20170621/999da208/attachment.html>