Hi Kalwit,

In Apache Pulsar, as in any other Apache project, everyone is equal
regardless of their committer or PMC status. All project participants
are free to express their opinions, and, where appropriate, have the
community consider them when decisions are made. [1]

I'm sorry to hear that you haven't felt this way. I believe we can find
a resolution.

We hold an open community meeting every two weeks on Zoom [2]. Anyone
can join these meetings. The agenda is maintained in a Google Doc [3],
where you can add items before the meeting. During the meeting, we
consider all agenda items. If we run out of time, we prioritize the
leftover items for the next meeting. The meeting's scope is the
development of Apache Pulsar and the community; it is not a place to
get free support in using Pulsar.

In remote work, there's a chance of feeling left out even when no one
intends to exclude you. In Apache Pulsar, we do have a problem with
responding to issues and pull requests in a reasonable time. It can feel
disheartening when you put significant effort into making a
contribution, and it goes unnoticed or ignored. I understand this
feeling. It also feels discouraging when someone gives you feedback
about something minor in your contribution, which doesn't really help
resolve the problem you're addressing. This happens when we're busy and
don't spend enough time caring about others' contributions. Apache
Pulsar's development is handled by the community, and there's no company
running this project. Therefore, when you don't get feedback, there's no
company to blame. We need to resolve the problems together in the
Apache Pulsar project. The decision process of Apache [1] does not
emphasize the committer or PMC status. I hope everyone could feel
empowered to express their opinions and have the community consider
them in order to make decisions to improve. It's also good to remember
that it's all volunteers and if nobody volunteers to do something that has
been suggested, it won't happen.

We need to find ways to improve the Apache Pulsar project so that
contributors can receive feedback in a reasonable time. Currently,
It is possible for the contributor to join the community meeting to
request feedback or promote their contribution on Pulsar Slack's #dev channel
until someone responds. However, this solution where "the loudest voice gets
the most attention", doesn't scale very well and limits the Pulsar project.
It also makes contributing feel very painful and not very welcoming.

I agree with Enrico's suggestion of starting a new thread to address
these problems. It's a good way to begin constructively finding a
solution. Perhaps defining the problems we have in the Pulsar community
would be a good starting point. One clear indication of a problem is the
number of open pull requests we have in apache/pulsar; currently, there
are 320 open pull requests.

I believe something good comes out of this. Looking forward to contributions
and volunteers to help fix things.

-Lari

1 - Decision making in Apache projects:
https://community.apache.org/committers/decisionMaking.html
2 - Calendar and Zoom link to meeting:
https://github.com/apache/pulsar/wiki/Community-Meetings
3 - Meeting agenda doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19dXkVXeU2q_nHmkG8zURjKnYlvD96TbKf5KjYyASsOE/edit

On Wed, 6 Mar 2024 at 09:32, Enrico Olivelli <eolive...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Kalwit,
> All the committers are invited by the PMC, you can reach out to
> priv...@pulsar.apache.org if you have any problems.
>
> Being a committer is not only about doing code contributions, but also
> talking care of the project and the community.
>
> I am sorry to hear that you feel that your contributions are blocked,
> please start a new thread with this problem.
>
> This is a community,  it is not a product managed by one single company.
>
> Best regards
> Enrico Olivelli
>
> Il Mer 6 Mar 2024, 06:27 Matteo Merli <matteo.me...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
>
> > I will not enter into debating the long list of grievances here, though I
> > thought I needed to clarify at least 2 points:
> >
> > 1. You can ask any questions and direct any feedback to the PMC (and if
> > you're not happy with the response you can take it all the way up to the
> > ASF Board), but personal attacks are not OK here
> >
> > 2. I don't think it's good looking when you're reacting to people
> > disagreeing with you by claiming they either are incompetent or have some
> > hidden agenda. Perhaps trying to understand why they disagreed with you
> > would be more helpful.
> >
> >
> > Matteo
> >
> > --
> > Matteo Merli
> > <matteo.me...@gmail.com>
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 7:22 PM Kalwit S <skalwit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Congratulations Asaf.
> > >
> > > Btw, does the Apache project have any promotion criteria for committers?
> > I
> > > looked at Asaf's commits at
> > > https://github.com/apache/pulsar/commits?author=asafm  and found that
> > 99%
> > > of the commits are simple documentation changes and 1% are related to PIP
> > > monitoring. Most of the PIP monitoring involves adding plugins to
> > existing
> > > metrics APIs. He has also contributed to the PIP reviews, but his
> > > contribution is more philosophical rather than technical. Most of his
> > > comments are comparing Pulsar to other projects, rather than focusing on
> > > the internal insights that Pulsar brings to the table. Our team has been
> > > running production traffic using Apache Pulsar for over a year now. We
> > have
> > > tried several different versions of Pulsar (which we have to constantly
> > > upgrade due to unknown issues in live production traffic) and have never
> > > seen a stable version of Pulsar. Our team has also tried to submit
> > multiple
> > > enhancements and also PIP, but most of them are bogged down by reviewers
> > > who are very new to Pulsar, might not understand messaging correctly, or
> > > don’t find such enhancements useful for their usecases.
> > > I would say that most of these reviewers are brand new to Pulsar, and
> > > almost all of them are from the same company that is also the provider of
> > > Pulsar. The same company controls Pulsar, prevents others from
> > > contributing, and avoids having non-pulsar committers. This is why we
> > > wanted to replace our existing Kafka cluster with Pulsar but we see no
> > > difference in Pulsar provider and Confluent because Pulsar is also
> > largely
> > > controlled by one provider and this company's reviewers are not
> > well-versed
> > > in such systems.
> > > In addition, we can see that almost all the reviewers are from the same
> > > company, and PIP approval requires 3+ votes, which means only specific
> > > reviewers belonging to one company participate and because of that, no
> > one
> > > can promote their improvements without the approval of the provider
> > > company. The Pulsar community needs to break away from the monopolies of
> > > the provider companies, start focusing on stable releases, and let other
> > > companies make their enhancements to meet their requirements, and
> > > experienced contributors or Pulsar creators should be active to prevent
> > > unfairness in the community.
> > >
> > > On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 3:31 PM Kalwit S <skalwit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Congratulations.!
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Tue, Feb 20, 2024 at 8:50 AM Lari Hotari <lhot...@apache.org>
> > wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> The Apache Pulsar Project Management Committee (PMC) has invited
> > > >> Asaf Mesika https://github.com/asafm to become a committer and we
> > > >> are pleased to announce that he has accepted.
> > > >>
> > > >> Welcome and Congratulations, Asaf Mesika!
> > > >>
> > > >> Please join us in congratulating and welcoming Asaf onboard!
> > > >>
> > > >> Best Regards,
> > > >>
> > > >> Lari Hotari
> > > >> on behalf of the Pulsar PMC
> > > >>
> > > >
> > >
> >

Reply via email to