There are no hard and fast rules. (Which makes it tricky to get right.) The goal here is to make the project transparent (permanent mail archives, posting IRC logs) and open (the most amount of people can contribute). The problem with IRC is that usually works against those goals.
The logs sidestep that, partly. It would be better if you posted your logs to the mailing list though. (So there is a permanent record of them.) The wiki is good (at least it is on ASF infra) but I believe (and I may be wrong) that the mailing list is preferred for conversational items. The open thing is problematic. People must be able to interact with the project via the mailing list. And they must be able to weigh in on topics, and help to make decisions. We cannot put barriers up that exclude them. (Either by choosing specific time to meet, or a specific location.) That's why important (stress on "important") decisions must not be made on IRC. So it comes down to a judgement call, I guess. If you're sorting out task lists, and somebody is saying that they will do X or Y, then that is obviously fine. But if you're deciding on features, or tickets, or patches, then it should be brought to the mailing list. That doesn't mean you can't talk about it on IRC. Or even come to a conclusion on IRC. But it must be presented to the mailing list as the outcome of a discussion which has been brought to the list. Bad: - Agreed we would not accept the patch on CLOUDSTACK-4566 Good: - Concerns raised about CLOUDSTACK-4566, noted on the ticket Another thing that might help is the distinction between a project decision and a person decision. A project decision might start with "CloudStack will not..." A personal decision might start with "I will..." This is an important distinction, because most of the things committers will be doing will be personal decisions. Whether to merge a patch, work on a feature, and so on. For things like that, consider the principals of lazy consensus and assent through silence. [1] That is, assume what you're about to do is okay, announce it, and then do it. No need to *ask permission* for stuff. So, for your meetings. It's fine if you're reporting that people are intending to DO stuff. But probably not too great if you are announcing that project level decisions are being made. (Remember that project level decisions might, in fact, include stuff like merging patches, or adding features. While it is generally favourable to operate according to "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission", sometimes commits, or tickets, or whatever, will be challenged, and that's when it needs to come to the lists.) Sorry if this isn't as terse as you were hoping. It's a complex issue. We struggled with it for years with CouchDB. It's more of an art than a science. We actually have a collection of very active IRC channels. And we discuss things frequently. But we will usually summarise what was discussed, and lay out a plan of action for individual committers. (As opposed to, for example, saying "CouchDB has decided to...") Keep the goals in mind, and try to do the right thing. [1] http://www.apache.org/foundation/voting.html On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 5:32 PM, Alex Huang <alex.hu...@citrix.com> wrote: > > The main "Red Flag" to me was the line: > > > > AGREED: continue using waf to build rpm package (jlkinsel, 17:24:57) > > > > As soon as I saw "AGREED", a little red flag popped up in my head > wondering > > if a decision had been made on IRC that should have been done on the > list. I > > believe this had been discussed to death on the list already (need to > double > > check, very busy list) and a quick link to show that would definitely > been > > helpful. > > Daniel, > > That's a really good point. Here the agreement was that waf is the > temporary solution to continue to use to get 4.0 release out. It's not an > agreement on long term direction of CloudStack. Does it still count as a > decision? I mean there's tons of these types of "decisions" made during > the IRC? For example, who's going to help with what work. Todo lists > being generated. Etc. Do these all count as decisions? > > --Alex > -- NS
