openstack-poc team mailing list archive

[Eric Day <eday@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 01:45:30PM -0400, Jay Pipes wrote:
> Finally, I personally view the promise of OpenStack as an open source
> project where the community has a clear, agreed upon way of
> contributing to the project as a whole and to the individual
> subprojects. Having every subproject doing their own thing from a
> community contribution perspective makes cross-project contribution
> difficult and potentially annoying to contributors. While I understand
> that the Swift code base is at a different stage in its life than the
> other subprojects and that the Swift team looks with disdain at the
> "simple projects" like Glance (Chuck's words, not mine), the fact is
> that there is an openness to contribution that seems to exist with
> Nova, Glance, and now Keystone that does not exist in the same way for
> either Swift or Burrow. I strongly feel that this is not by accident.

I'm not sure what barriers there really are right now that prevent
contributors. Swift and Burrow are setup the same way as Nova and
Glance on Launchpad, and Keystone is on github. If Swift and Burrow
don't have the same openness, but keystone does, I don't think this
has anything to do with the tooling or autonomy since up to this
point they have been more or less the same. I think it has more to
do with visibility or attractiveness of work that needs to be done.

>From my perspective, Nova is a hot project with a lot of active dev
going on. When people think cloud they usually think VM fabric first,
so that is the project to go to. Glance and Keystone have piggybacked
on this since they are core dependencies for Nova (and Keystone to
other projects too of course). I will say that Jay has done a great
job of keeping Glance very visible and accessible via the mailing
list and other means, something everyone could do a bit more of.

Swift is fairly mature so it doesn't require the same level of
attention. It probably isn't going to gain the same popularity as
the VM fabric components though.

Burrow is still early on and does have the same visibility yet,
and will probably not have the same popularity either even when it
is mature.

All this is perfectly fine of course, we just need to realize each
project is somewhere different on the spectrum, or on an entirely
different spectrum. Drawing comparisons between them can sometimes
be comparing apples to oranges, which is why I think less policy and
more autonomy is a better route.

-Eric