James Bottomley <mailto:james.bottom...@hansenpartnership.com>
May 5, 2015 at 9:53 AM
On Tue, 2015-05-05 at 10:45 +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
Joe Gordon wrote:
[...]
To tackle this I would like to propose the idea of a periodic developer
oriented newsletter, and if we agree to go forward with this, hopefully
the foundation can help us find someone to write newsletter.
I've been discussing the idea of a "LWN" for OpenStack for some time,
originally with Mark McLoughlin. For those who don't know it, LWN
(lwn.net) is a source of quality tech reporting on Linux in general (and
the kernel in particular). It's written by developers and tech reporters
and funded by subscribers.
An LWN-like OpenStack development newsletter would provide general
status, dive into specific features, report on specific
talks/conferences, summarize threads etc. It would be tremendously
useful to the development community.
The issue is, who can write such content ? It is a full-time job to
produce authored content, you can't just copy (or link to) content
produced elsewhere. It takes a very special kind of individual to write
such content: the person has to be highly technical, able to tackle any
topic, and totally connected with the OpenStack development community.
That person has to be cross-project and ideally have already-built
legitimacy.
Here, you're being overly restrictive. Lwn.net isn't staffed by top
level kernel maintainers (although it does solicit the occasional
article from them). It's staffed by people who gained credibility via
their insightful reporting rather than by their contributions. I see no
reason why the same model wouldn't work for OpenStack.
There is one technical difference: in the kernel, you can get all the
information from the linux-kernel (and other mailing list) firehose if
you're skilled enough to extract it. With OpenStack, openstack-dev
isn't enough so you have to do other stuff as well, but that's more or
less equivalent to additional research.
It's basically the kind of profile every OpenStack company
is struggling and fighting to hire. And that rare person should not
really want to spend that much time developing (or become CTO of a
startup) but prefer to write technical articles about what happens in
OpenStack development. I'm not sure such a person exists. And a
newsletter actually takes more than one such person, because it's a lot
of work (even if not weekly).
That's a bit pessimistic: followed to it's logical conclusion it would
say that lwn.net can't exist either ... which is a bit of a
contradiction.
So as much as I'd like this to happen, I'm not convinced it's worth
getting excited unless we have clear indication that we would have
people willing and able to pull it off. The matter of who pays the bill
is secondary -- I just don't think the profile exists.
For the matter, I tried to push such an idea in the past and couldn't
find anyone to fit the rare profile I think is needed to succeed. All
the people I could think of had other more interesting things to do. I
don't think things changed -- but I'd love to be proven wrong.
Um, I assume you've thought of this already, but have you tried asking
lwn.net? As you say above, they already fit the profile. Whether they
have the bandwidth is another matter, but I believe their Chief Editor
(Jon Corbet) may welcome a broadening of the funding base, particularly
if the OpenStack foundation were offering seed funding for the
endeavour.
+1 to that, although lwn.net is partially subscriber only (yes I'm a
subscriber); so if say we had a 'openstack section' there (just like
there is a kernel section, or a security section, or a distributions
section...) how would that work? It'd be neat to have what we do on
lwn.net vs having a openstack clone/similar thing to lwn.net (because
IMHO we already make ourselves 'special' enough...).
-Josh
James
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Thierry Carrez <mailto:thie...@openstack.org>
May 5, 2015 at 1:45 AM
I've been discussing the idea of a "LWN" for OpenStack for some time,
originally with Mark McLoughlin. For those who don't know it, LWN
(lwn.net) is a source of quality tech reporting on Linux in general (and
the kernel in particular). It's written by developers and tech reporters
and funded by subscribers.
An LWN-like OpenStack development newsletter would provide general
status, dive into specific features, report on specific
talks/conferences, summarize threads etc. It would be tremendously
useful to the development community.
The issue is, who can write such content ? It is a full-time job to
produce authored content, you can't just copy (or link to) content
produced elsewhere. It takes a very special kind of individual to write
such content: the person has to be highly technical, able to tackle any
topic, and totally connected with the OpenStack development community.
That person has to be cross-project and ideally have already-built
legitimacy. It's basically the kind of profile every OpenStack company
is struggling and fighting to hire. And that rare person should not
really want to spend that much time developing (or become CTO of a
startup) but prefer to write technical articles about what happens in
OpenStack development. I'm not sure such a person exists. And a
newsletter actually takes more than one such person, because it's a lot
of work (even if not weekly).
So as much as I'd like this to happen, I'm not convinced it's worth
getting excited unless we have clear indication that we would have
people willing and able to pull it off. The matter of who pays the bill
is secondary -- I just don't think the profile exists.
For the matter, I tried to push such an idea in the past and couldn't
find anyone to fit the rare profile I think is needed to succeed. All
the people I could think of had other more interesting things to do. I
don't think things changed -- but I'd love to be proven wrong.
Joe Gordon <mailto:joe.gord...@gmail.com>
May 4, 2015 at 12:03 PM
Before going any further, I am proposing something to make it easier
for the developer community to keep track of what other projects are
working on. I am not proposing anything to directly help operators or
users, that is a separate problem space.
In Mark McClain's TC candidacy email he brought up the issue of cross
project communication[0]:
Better cross project communication will make it easier to share
technical solutions and promote a more unified experience across
projects. It seems like just about every time I talk to people from
different projects I learn about something interesting and relevant
that they are working on.
While I usually track discussions on the mailing list, it is a poor
way of keeping track of what the big issues each project is working
on. Stefano's 'OpenStack Community Weekly Newsletter' does a good job
of highlighting many things including important mailing list
conversations, but it doesn't really answer the question of What is X
(Ironic, Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Keystone, Heat etc.) up to?
To tackle this I would like to propose the idea of a periodic
developer oriented newsletter, and if we agree to go forward with
this, hopefully the foundation can help us find someone to write
newsletter.
Now on to the details.
I am not sure what the right cadence for this newsletter would be, but
I think weekly is too
frequent and once a 6 month cycle would be too infrequent.
The big questions I would like to see answered are:
* What are the big challenges each project is currently working on?
* What can we learn from each other?
* Where are individual projects trying to solve the same problem
independently?
To answer these questions one needs to look at a lot of sources,
including:
* Weekly meeting logs, or hopefully just the notes assuming we get
better at taking detailed notes
* approved specs
* periodically talk to the PTL of each project to see if any big
discussions were discussed else where
* Topics selected for discussion at summits
Off the top of my head here are a few topics that would make good
candidates for this newsletter:
* What are different projects doing with microversioned APIs, I know
that at least two projects are tackling this
* How has the specs process evolved in each project, we all started
out from a common point but seem to have all gone in slightly
different directions
* What will each projects priorities be in Liberty? Do any of them
overlap?
* Any process changes that projects have tried that worked or didn't work
* How is functional testing evolving in each project
Would this help with cross project communication? Is this feasible?
Other thoughts?
best,
Joe
[0]
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-April/062361.html
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