On 10/26/2015 03:40 PM, Tim Bannister wrote:
On 26 Oct 2015, at 22:23, Nick Kew <n...@webthing.com> wrote:
I wonder if workflow would be improved if we had named maintainers
for particular parts of the codebase - for example individual
modules? Not necessarily to do all the work, but to take primary
responsibility to see that your ideas don't just fall through the
gaps and get ignored?
How does the word “sponsor” sound?
Someone who encourages and champions the development activity around
a particular feature (and is also very welcome to contribute). The
existing and more formal mechanisms for approving commits seem to
work fine as a way of controlling the quality of code.
I like "sponsor". In contrast, "primary maintainer" implies (at least to
me) a lot of ownership over a section of code, which doesn't seem to fit
into the Apache style.
Improving the workflow means, to me, coaching and leadership, and
different kinds of code review. Someone who isn't very good at C
(like me) might well want to make a code contribution but not be sure
how. I saw recently how much perseverance Yingqi Lu put in towards
getting SO_REUSEPORT support into trunk and then into 2.4.17 – and
that's great. It's unfortunate that the same perseverance also offers
a lesson about the kind of barriers that a would-be contributor might
encounter.
So, sponsorship can be about encouraging participation and progress.
I'm imagining someone who rarely has to settle a decision – those
should stay consensual and democratic - but often leads discussions
and moves things on.
I like this. So your sponsor's qualities (coaching/servant
leadership/facilitation) are primarily to break down the barriers to
contribution.
I think there are now two topics of conversation, though. To wrap this
back around to Jim's question, which was about the "patchiness" of the
server (sorry, Jim, for somewhat derailing your thread)...
In addition to a sponsor, having someone with "the grand vision" for a
section of the server would be good too. Someone who tries to be
involved with related patches, to ensure that work in one area does not
conflict with other (un)related work... basically, to make sure that a
piece of the server is moving in one direction at once. (I would call
such a person an "architect", though I think that term is probably
loaded with a lot of baggage for those of you in the corporate world.)
I don't know if a sponsor and an architect could/should/would be the
same person in httpd's case; I don't even know if either of those roles
makes sense in Apache culture. And I understand that this is a volunteer
project and not a corporation. But from the outside looking in, it would
be nice if both roles were filled for various parts of the server. Maybe
they already are filled, and I just can't see them?
--Jacob
