[Openstack-devel] welcoming new contributors (was: Moving all git repositories to git.gplhost.com)

[Thomas Goirand]

I generally agree with what you wrote. Just a few things below.

On 11/21/2013 09:47 PM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> - you make it as easy as possible for people to contribute, and follow
>   recommended practices for teams. For example, I see that the OpenStack
>   team doesn't have a wiki page on https://wiki.debian.org/Teams.

It's there:
http://openstack.alioth.debian.org/

Well, sorry, it *WAS* there before the crash of Alioth... :)
This page explained the workflow.

Anyway, we also have this:
https://wiki.debian.org/OpenStack

with the very important bit being the todo list.

Though I take a note of the general "Teams" page, and will add a link
from there, for the sake of consistency and to be found more easily.

> (FTR, I've met a quite a few people interested in contributing to
> OpenStack packaging, and I'm surprised that some of them at least
> haven't turned into contributors. For me, it indicates that there's a
> margin for improvement in the way the team is managed)

Many people showed up, where added to the Alioth packaging group, though
only Gustavo did some actual work. Which is why I added the todo. I
believe that part of the problem is that OpenStack is just too big, and
it's hard to know where to start. Though there's enough very easy to
solve bugs to work on for example, committing the debconf templates
translations to the git. That's very easy, and doesn't need any help
from anyone.

Though you are probably right that there's an issue on my side, and that
I should take more time to help potential new contributors, and I've
been thinking for a long time how to improve that.

On 11/21/2013 09:47 PM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> How does that feedback get to you? Asking them to use the Debian BTS
> could be a bit too much, but on the other hand, if you opened some
> bugs yourself in the Debian BTS, it could provide contribution ideas
> for prospective contributors.

It goes through IRC. Adding the BTS in the loop would add too much work.
Let me give you an example. Before the release of Havana a few weeks
ago, there was a wrong default option in Cinder. That package was at the
time, only in experimental (I uploaded the RC versions there before the
release dead line). This was a one liner fix that took me 5 minutes.
Adding the BTS in the loop would have take probably 3 or 4 times the
amount of time. Time which I don't have available. So no, this
unfortunately isn't realistic to systematically open a bug in the BTS,
even if I agree it would be the correct thing to do.

On 11/21/2013 09:47 PM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> Also note that the fact that you are paid by eNovance to work on
> Debian packages is likely to affect negatively the participation of
> new contributors, especially if your work with eNovance influences
> the way the packages are managed (due to the "why should I work for
> eNovance for free?" feeling).

I believe that eNovance is sponsoring my work because they know what
Debian is, both technically and socially. They how much we care that
things are done openly, in a community spirit, and they know how much I
care about Debian. However, eNovance is distribution agnostic. They have
just announced a partnership with RedHat, and will use Fedora / CentOS /
RHEL as their customer see fit. So I don't believe there's any conflict
of interest here.

What's funny, is that as I can see around, absolutely *all* other
vendors (but eNovance) are selling a kind of "OpenStack distribution"
(which isn't a full distro, just a software product they sell to their
customers: packages on top of an existing distribution).

Anyway, one of the big motivations I have in finding new contributors is
exactly because I would like the Debian packages to be considered even
more as coming from a community. I would especially like to find people
from big companies with production in mind. During the last summit in
Hongkong, I have discussed with some people from Comcast, which are
willing to help. This is exactly the kind of contributors I am looking
for. I intend to get all the business cards that I have collected, and
ask everyone to participate to the packaging effort as well. Though I
don't want to do this before all the Git repositories are moved to
openstack-infra, so we can leverage the use of Gerrit and patch reviews.
Otherwise, it's going to be hell to manage contributions.

Any comment on the above plan, and how to improve things, is welcome.

Also, I have been thinking a lot about the git thing. And I believe that
the way to go for me, currently (that is, before switching to
openstack-infra), would be to push to *both* git.gplhost.com and Alioth.
That way, I would have both something in the Debian "normal"
infrastructure, and a server from which I can push/pull fast. Maybe that
could be done with some receive hooks on git.gplhost.com. I know that's
possible at least. Any suggestion on how to do this would be welcome, as
I'm not sure how this work.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)