[openstack-dev] Fwd: [nova][core] Expectations of core reviewers
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
Re: [openstack-dev] Fwd: [nova][core] Expectations of core reviewers
On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 09:01:59AM -0700, Maru Newby 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.
I'm not questioning the value of f2f - I'm questioning the idea of
doing f2f meetings sooo many times a year. OpenStack is very much
the outlier here among open source projects - the vast majority of
projects get along very well with much less f2f time and a far
smaller % of their contributors attend those f2f meetings that do
happen. So I really do question what is missing from OpenStack's
community interaction that makes us believe that having 4 f2f
meetings a year is critical to our success.
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.
As pointed out this benefit for core devs has a direct negative
impact on other non-core devs. I'm questioning whether this is
really a net win overall vs other approaches to collaboration.
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
[openstack-dev] Fwd: [nova][core] Expectations of core reviewers
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
