[tc] [election] Candidate question: growth of projects

Jim Rollenhagen jim at jimrollenhagen.com
Fri Feb 22 18:26:37 UTC 2019


On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 6:14 AM Chris Dent <cdent+os at anticdent.org> wrote:

>
> This is another set of questions for TC candidates, to look at a
> different side of things from my first one [1] and somewhat related
> to the one Doug has asked [2].
>
> As Doug mentions, a continuing role of the TC is to evaluate
> applicants to be official projects. These questions are about that.
>
> There are 63 teams in the official list of projects. How do you feel
> about this size? Too big, too small, just right? Why?
>
> If you had to make a single declaration about growth in the number
> of projects would you prefer to see (and why, of course):
>
> * More projects as required by demand.
> * Slower or no growth to focus on what we've got.
> * Trim the number of projects to "get back to our roots".
> * Something else.
>
> How has the relatively recent emergence of the open infrastructure
> projects that are at the same "level" in the Foundation as OpenStack
> changed your thoughts on the above questions?
>
> Do you think the number of projects has any impact (positive or
> negative) on our overall ability to get things done?
>

I haven't formed a strong opinion on the above, but I'll answer this.

I don't think the number of projects has made a significant impact on our
ability to get things done overall. If something is important to a certain
amount of users or operators, I believe it will somehow get done eventually
(with the caveat that the number of people it is important to scales with
the
effort required to get it done).

But I do think it makes a negative impact on the ability to keep things
consistent. The projects with fewer contributor-hours, so to speak, will
have a hard time finding sufficient time to keep up with the large number
of things we attempt to make consistent between projects. Between python
versions, the PTI, docs structure, rolling upgrades, stable policy, API
versioning, API "feel", client consistency, etc.etc.etc., there's a lot to
keep up with that seems to change fairly frequently.


>
> Recognizing that there are many types of contributors, not just
> developers, this question is about developers: Throughout history
> different members of the community have sometimes identified as an
> "OpenStack developer", sometimes as a project developer (e.g., "Nova
> developer"). Should we encourage contributors to think of themselves
> as primarily OpenStack developers? If so, how do we do that? If not,
> why not?
>

Yes. Or maybe just anything other than "$project developers". Ideally I
like to think that we would organize ourselves more around classes of
features
or layers of the stack. I'd like to see more "compute node developers",
"networking developers", "REST API developers", "quota developers", etc. I
think this would allow us to get important things done consistently across
a wider number of projects, eventually making OpenStack a more coherent
thing.

That said, our culture is so ingrained as-is (both here and inside our
supporting employers), that I'm not sure how to make this change. I'd love
to talk with others and figure that out.

// jim
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