openstack-poc team mailing list archive

[Jay Pipes <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Eric Day <eday@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.

I would partly agree with this, sure. However, I don't see how having
*more* autonomy helps bring OpenStack projects together nor encourage
cross-project contributions.

> From my perspective, Nova is a hot project with a lot of active dev
> going on.

Burrow and Swift could be the same IMHO.

> 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.

I disagree, but we can agree to disagree.

> 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.

I disagree again :)

> 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.

I don't see how you reach that conclusion. If we are to compare
OpenStack projects to each other, we either view them as interrelated
components of a cloud computing platform, or we don't. If you do view
them as interrelated, then having the projects follow an agreed-to set
of vetted options makes them more comparable as apples. If you don't
agree with the overall philosophy, then everything will always be
apples and oranges.

Best,
jay