My apologies, I managed to break the thread here. Please respond to the thread
with subject 'Re: [openstack-dev] [nova][core] Expectations of core reviewers'
in preference to this one.
Maru
On Aug 13, 2014, at 9:01 AM, Maru Newby <ma...@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 13, 2014, at 2:57 AM, Daniel P. Berrange <berra...@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 08:57:40AM +1000, Michael Still wrote:
>>> Hi.
>>>
>>> One of the action items from the nova midcycle was that I was asked to
>>> make nova's expectations of core reviews more clear. This email is an
>>> attempt at that.
>>>
>>> Nova expects a minimum level of sustained code reviews from cores. In
>>> the past this has been generally held to be in the order of two code
>>> reviews a day, which is a pretty low bar compared to the review
>>> workload of many cores. I feel that existing cores understand this
>>> requirement well, and I am mostly stating it here for completeness.
>>>
>>> Additionally, there is increasing levels of concern that cores need to
>>> be on the same page about the criteria we hold code to, as well as the
>>> overall direction of nova. While the weekly meetings help here, it was
>>> agreed that summit attendance is really important to cores. Its the
>>> way we decide where we're going for the next cycle, as well as a
>>> chance to make sure that people are all pulling in the same direction
>>> and trust each other.
>>>
>>> There is also a strong preference for midcycle meetup attendance,
>>> although I understand that can sometimes be hard to arrange. My stance
>>> is that I'd like core's to try to attend, but understand that
>>> sometimes people will miss one. In response to the increasing
>>> importance of midcycles over time, I commit to trying to get the dates
>>> for these events announced further in advance.
>>
>> Personally I'm going to find it really hard to justify long distance
>> travel 4 times a year for OpenStack for personal / family reasons,
>> let alone company cost. I couldn't attend Icehouse mid-cycle because
>> I just had too much travel in a short time to be able to do another
>> week long trip away from family. I couldn't attend Juno mid-cycle
>> because it clashed we personal holiday. There are other opensource
>> related conferences that I also have to attend (LinuxCon, FOSDEM,
>> KVM Forum, etc), etc so doubling the expected number of openstack
>> conferences from 2 to 4 is really very undesirable from my POV.
>> I might be able to attend the occassional mid-cycle meetup if the
>> location was convenient, but in general I don't see myself being
>> able to attend them regularly.
>>
>> I tend to view the fact that we're emphasising the need of in-person
>> meetups to be somewhat of an indication of failure of our community
>> operation. The majority of open source projects work very effectively
>> with far less face-to-face time. OpenStack is fortunate that companies
>> are currently willing to spend 6/7-figure sums flying 1000's of
>> developers around the world many times a year, but I don't see that
>> lasting forever so I'm concerned about baking the idea of f2f midcycle
>> meetups into our way of life even more strongly.
>
> I was fortunate to attend both the Nova and Neutron mid-cycles last month,
> and I can attest to how productive these gatherings were. Discussion moved
> quickly and misunderstandings were rapidly resolved. Informal
> ('water-cooler') conversation led to many interactions that might not
> otherwise have occurred. Given your attendance of summit and other open
> source conferences, though, I'm assuming the value of f2f is not in question.
>
> Nothing good is ever free. The financial cost and exclusionary nature of an
> in-person meetup should definitely be weighed against the opportunity for
> focused and high-bandwidth communication. It's clear to myself and other
> attendees just how valuable the recent mid-cycles were in terms of making
> technical decisions and building the relationships to support their
> implementation. Maybe it isn't sustainable over the long-term to meet so
> often, but I don't think that should preclude us from deriving benefit in the
> short-term. I also don't think we should ignore the opportunity for more
> effective decision-making on the grounds that not everyone can directly
> participate. Not everyone is able to attend summit, but it is nonetheless a
> critical part of our community's decision-making process. The topic lists
> for a mid-cycle are published beforehand, just like summit, to allow
> non-attendees the chance to present their views in advance and/or designate
> one or more attendees to advocate
on their behalf. It's not perfect, but the alternative - not holding
mid-cycles - would seem to be a case of throwing out the baby with the
bathwater.
>
>
> Maru
>
>>
>>> Given that we consider these physical events so important, I'd like
>>> people to let me know if they have travel funding issues. I can then
>>> approach the Foundation about funding travel if that is required.
>>
>> Travel funding is certainly an issue, but I'm not sure that Foundation
>> funding would be a solution, because the impact probably isn't directly
>> on the core devs. Speaking with my Red Hat on, if the midcycle meetup
>> is important enough, the core devs will likely get the funding to attend.
>> The fallout of this though is that every attendee at a mid-cycle summit
>> means fewer attendees at the next design summit. So the impact of having
>> more core devs at mid-cycle is that we'll get fewer non-core devs at
>> the design summit. This sucks big time for the non-core devs who want
>> to engage with our community.
>>
>> Also having each team do a f2f mid-cycle meetup at a different location
>> makes it even harder for people who have a genuine desire / need to take
>> part in multiple teams. Going to multiple mid-cycle meetups is even more
>> difficult to justify so they're having to make difficult decisions about
>> which to go to :-(
>>
>> I'm also not a fan of mid-cycle meetups because I feel it further
>> stratifies our contributors into two increasly distinct camps - core
>> vs non-core.
>>
>> I can see that a big benefit of a mid-cycle meetup is to be a focal
>> point for collaboration, to forcably break contributors our of their
>> day-to-day work pattern to concentrate on discussing specific issues.
>> It also obviously solves the distinct timezone problem we have with
>> our dispersed contributor base. I think that we should be examining
>> what we can achieve with some kind of virtual online mid-cycle meetups
>> instead. Using technology like google hangouts or some similar live
>> collaboration technology, not merely an IRC discussion. Pick a 2-3
>> day period, schedule formal agendas / talking slots as you would with
>> a physical summit and so on. I feel this would be more inclusive to
>> our community as a whole, avoid excessive travel costs, so allowing
>> more of our community to attend the bigger design summits. It would
>> even open possibility of having multiple meetups during a cycle (eg
>> could arrange mini virtual events around each milestone if we wanted)
>>
>> Regards,
>> Daniel
>> --
>> |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
>> |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :|
>> |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
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>>
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>
>
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