On Apr 23, 2015, at 11:14 AM, Chris Dent <chd...@redhat.com> wrote:

> This might be a bit presumptuous, but why not give it a try…

Presumptuous? Nah, any candidate should be willing to answer questions.

> This cycle's TC elections didn't come with a set of prepackaged
> questions and though the self-nomination messages have included some
> very interesting stuff I think it would be useful to get answers
> from the candidates on at least one topical but open-ended
> question. Maybe other people have additional questions they think
> are important but this one is the one that matters to me and also
> captures the role that I wish the TC filled more strongly. Here's
> the preamble:
[snip]
> Here's the question:
> 
> What can and should the TC at large, and you specifically, do to ensure
> quality improves for the developers, end-users and operators of
> OpenStack as a full system, both as a project being developed and a
> product being used?

You really weren't kidding about it being "open-ended", huh? :)

Let me start with developers, since that's the area that's closest to home for 
me, and especially Nova developers, since that's where my focus is. For devs 
who are new to contributing to Nova, the biggest frustration is the sheer 
amount of time it takes to get a patch reviewed. Sure, different reviewers will 
focus on different things, and will ask you to fix this or that, but you expect 
that if you've been working in open source for any length of time. What you 
don't expect is that you work on something, test the hell out of it, and submit 
it, only to… wait. And wait. And then rebase because it's been sitting so long. 
And then wait some more.

This isn't the result of reviewers being lazy; it's the result of having too 
few people available compared to the number of patches in need of review. I 
would like to see the TC take an active role in helping various teams set up 
training for new potential core reviewers where there is a shortage to help 
alleviate this bottleneck.

I'm not sure what you see as the difference between the "end users" and the 
"operators" of OpenStack, because in my mind they are one and the same. I don't 
consider the people using, say, public cloud services to be OpenStack end 
users, because ultimately they just want stuff that works, and if it doesn't, 
they'll blame the provider, not OpenStack. I see our end users as the people 
who deploy and run OpenStack clouds.

I'd like to see the core of OpenStack defined more clearly (i.e., Monty's Layer 
#1 [0]), and everything else able to be added as needed. The current situation 
is a bit confusing, because there are just so many pieces that one can put 
together to get something called 'OpenStack'. The Big Tent movement is great, 
and I'm all for it, but I can see the growth of these 'parts' causing a lot of 
pain to operators if they don't all work the same way. We know that there is 
pain now getting things to play together nicely; having dozens more potential 
pieces would make things much worse for ops. Project that have interfaces that 
are clearly defined, however, will allow for a much better loose coupling of 
these parts, and would go a long way to making the work that operators do to 
integrate things smoother. I think efforts such as the API Working Group is an 
excellent start in this direction, and I would push for other such standards. 
They aren't mandatory, but if your project doesn't follow them, you're probably 
not going to win many friends in the ops community.

[0] 
http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/openstack-as-layers-but-also-a-big-tent-but-also-a-bunch-of-cats


-- Ed Leafe





Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail

__________________________________________________________________________
OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe
http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev

Reply via email to