Open Stack

On 11/11/14 10:31, Anne Gentle wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 8:24 PM, Tom Fifield <tom at openstack.org
> <mailto:tom at openstack.org>> wrote:
> 
>     On 11/11/14 10:22, Anne Gentle wrote:
>     >
>     >
>     > On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 8:20 PM, Tom Fifield <tom at openstack.org <mailto:tom at openstack.org>
>     > <mailto:tom at openstack.org <mailto:tom at openstack.org>>> wrote:
>     >
>     >     On 11/11/14 10:19, Anne Gentle wrote:
>     >     >
>     >     >
>     >     > On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 8:10 PM, Tom Fifield <tom at openstack.org <mailto:tom at openstack.org>
>     <mailto:tom at openstack.org <mailto:tom at openstack.org>>
>     >     > <mailto:tom at openstack.org <mailto:tom at openstack.org>
>     <mailto:tom at openstack.org <mailto:tom at openstack.org>>>> wrote:
>     >     >
>     >     >     Hi,
>     >     >
>     >     >     If I recall correctly, there was not consensus on this in the past.
>     >     >
>     >     >     I have removed it, for now, on that basis.
>     >     >
>     >     >
>     >     > Okay, let's start the discussion here then.
>     >     >
>     >     > I remember agreeing to American English for the Operations Guide.
>     >
>     >     Actually, we agreed on the Atlantic standard :)
>     >
>     >     > Can we agree to American English for the openstack-manuals?
>     >
>     >     Actually, I don't think we need to agree on any standard.
>     >
>     >
>     > I'd like to have a convention to point to during reviews. Today I
>     > requested a revision of colours to colors and it would be great to point
>     > new contributors to a standard to follow.
> 
>     I don't think this is useful or necessary at all. Adding such a standard
>     just means more pointless patchset revisions, wasting time of all
>     involved - which should be spent on fixing the enormous bug backlog.
> 
> 
> Okay. Guess we'll have to disagree on this point. With the contributor
> base we hope to reach I think we'll need the enhanced style guide that
> Andreas is working on. 
> 
> Again, the large bug backlog is due to the growth of projects, and we
> need to onboard more contributors in order to get those numbers down and
> better distributed.

Actually, these are quite related. Firstly, we need our existing
contributors to be as efficient as they possibly can be to solve bugs.
Changing a word to add in an additional character is not a valuable use
of time. Secondly, we also need to be as welcoming as possible to every
single person who's brave enough to get a patch up. At the moment we're
alienating people.

The stats cannot be explained entirely by 'project growth' - see Matt
K's recent email, for example. Why did the number of significant
contributors go down? Why do I get messages like this one after coaxing
a technical expert to contribute?

"""
writing docs for openstack: never again
the whole thing is poop and i refuse to comment again on
that review, and if someone emails me asking to convert one of
its blogs to docs i will say no, suffer, people googling this important
thing can come to our website instead
"""

I was lucky enough in that case to get the contributor through, but note
that the flatlining of contributions, time-wise, correlates with a
marked increase in "Conventions" discussions.

Changing 'colour' to 'color' might seem like a sensible thing to do, but
in truth, it's stuff like that that's killing this project's ability to
make things fun for volunteers.

So, work on reducing the behemoth of the style guide is very welcome.
Every additional patchset is (at least) a few minutes we don't spend
working on another bug, or losing us potential long-term contributors
(and friends ^_^).


> Anne
>  
> 
>     >
> 
>     > Anne
>     >
>     >
>     >
>     >
>     >     >
>     >     >
>     >     >
>     >     >     Regards,
>     >     >
>     >     >
>     >     >     Tom
>     >     >
>     >     >     On 11/11/14 03:52, Anne Gentle wrote:
>     >     >     > Hi all,
>     >     >     > In the past we have had consensus around using American English
>     >     >     > spellings, so I added it to the Conventions page here:
>     >     >     >
>     >     >     >
>     >     >     https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Documentation/Conventions#Terms_and_usage
>     >     >     >
>     >     >     > Wanted to bring it to the list to make sure it's generally known.
>     >     >     > Thanks,
>     >     >     > Anne
>     >     >     >
>     >     >     >
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