Open Stack

On Wed, 9 Aug 2017, Thierry Carrez wrote:

> Chris Dent wrote:
>> (First, a meta: can we adjust the mailing list configuration so the
>> reply-to is the list, so we don't have this thing where responses go
>> to the author and the list, or just the author. Very messy.)
>
> Done! I thought that was done by default, but apparently not.

\o/ Thank you.

>> Can you define your terms upstream and downstream here? We use them
>> in so many different ways, yet I'm never quite sure how they mean
>> nor the parties involved.
>
> Upstream is before the commit lands / the software is released.
> Corresponds to development activities (writing code, choosing
> dependencies, writing doc, etc.). In OpenStack governance, that's the
> domain of the Technical Committee.
>
> Downstream is after the commit lands / the software is released.
> Corresponds to software consumption activities (deploying, writing apps
> against...). In OpenStack governance, that's the domain of the User
> Committee.

Thanks for that. Those are similar to other definitions I've heard
but the devil is in the details.

> (Just curious: could you give some examples of the "so many different
> ways" we use those terms? I thought they were pretty well defined in the
> open source world...)

Again, I think it is the details, but one of the other flavors is in
terms of consumption. For example, libvirt is upstream of nova which is
upstream of RDO.

Or in terms of employment. In my three different employments that
have been associated with OpenStack I've been to varying degrees an
"upstream developer". That has less to do with when I work in
relation to a commit, but more in terms of with whom I am working.

So in that context of ambiguity I tend to think of "upstreaming"
having an implication of making it so it is being worked on by multiple
companies instead of one or a few. In which case we often want to upstream
as much as possible.

In fact I'll get on board with saying that the "user committe" being
relevant post-commit is a _huge_ bug in how we explain and act in
our culture. It seems SIGs want to kill that boundary. If that's
true, that's great. "Users" should be invovled from the very start.

>> One of the main concerns we expressed when discussing this in the
>> last api-wg meeting was whether a move to the os-sig mailing list
>> would mean the weekly newsletter loses its audience, or whether
>> perhaps we should publish in both places and if we do that, gosh
>> isn't that annoying?
>
> I may be wrong, but I see the newsletter as an *output* of the group,

Okay, this is the critical distinction: os-sig is for intra sig (and
perhaps inter sig in the meta sense) communication, no so much for
reaching whichever audiences exist. That's good.

> I don't think you need to change any of that, frankly. The IRC meeting
> should stay the same. If you want to specifically reach a
> developer-specific audience (or ask them questions), you should
> definitely continue to post to openstack-dev. If you want to
> specifically reach an operator-specific audience, you should post to
> openstack-operators. But if you want to have a discussion between the
> API SIG members, you can use openstack-sigs, avoiding to cross-post
> between -devs and -ops in an attempt to reach them all (or worse, pick
> one and exclude the others, or even worse, refrain from having group
> discussions on the ML because there is no good way to have them there).

Sounds mostly reasonable, I don't see any real blockers for API-WG
being API SIG. I assume we'll talk about it more in tomorrow's
meeting.

But lets move on to reflecting one of the other concerns I've
heard:

In actual behaviors and intent, how is this different from what
we've had before? What are we changing, other than the name, so that
people will feel inclined to participate? Or is the hope that by
causing this moment of attention we'll provide an opportunity for
people to take note, one that they wouldn't have felt otherwise
without the naming shift?

Thanks.

-- 
Chris Dent                      (⊙＿⊙')         https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent