Sebastien Roy wrote:
> (moved out of the case review, and over to arc-discuss)
>
> On Thu, 2009-07-09 at 12:38 -0500, Nicolas Williams wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 10:18:48AM -0700, Bart Smaalders wrote:
>>
>>> One of the problems that PSARC has had is that those who are doing
>>> interesting work often found it difficult to justify the time
>>> commitment involved in active participation. This would sometimes
>>> lead to having folks involved on PSARC who hadn't actually delivered
>>> a project involving substantial change to the system in many years.
>>>
>> The obvious solution to this is blow up the number of members so as to
>> spread the load. That might not work for other reasons, it's worth
>> doing _something_ to keep the ARC function while addressing the above
>> problem. Another solution would be to rotate members into and out of
>> the ARC, so that members don't get stuck with heavy ARC load for more
>> than, say, 1 year, sort of how gatekeeping used to be (you'd do your
>> stint as GK, and then go back to normal projects).
>>
>> Even with OpenSolaris, which might change user expectations of interface
>> stability to match Linux user expectations of that, the ARC function is,
>> IMO, very important. If it's not working out well now, we should look
>> at how to make it work well.
>>
>
> One related thing I've thought about is collapsing the ARCs into one
> ARC. Having the ability to draw from a wider range of expertise and
> more members and interns on a given case review could be a good thing.
>
This sounds like a good idea, but I think there are simply too many
cases such that normal humans would probably spend too much time just
triaging cases and deciding whether or not it is relevant. Spreading
the load via LSARC/PSARC split I think actually works pretty well.
The reality is that PSARC duties really are not *that* onerous. And, if
we had more members, it would help even further reduce the load imposed
on the individual members. I know I try to read every case now that
I'm chair, but as an ordinary member, if I see other cases that other
members with more relevant expertise than I have are commenting on, then
there's a good chance I'll just ignore it and defer to the other
member(s) who are reviewing the case materials.
I think the 20% time estimate for normal members is actually not a
terrible one, although it might be a bit high. (As a chair, I have
spent more than that, but the estimate for chair duties is 40%.)
I think its most useful to have senior members of the staff on the
ARC. If everyone doing real work stays off ARC, then you won't have an
effective ARC.
Now, as an aside, I believe that the business teams that have members on
ARC benefit greatly by it. The ARC members are able to help shepherd
that teams projects, and mentor the rest of the staff, so that when
projects come to ARC they are more fully formed, and streamlined in a
way that minimizes contention at ARC. This helps ARC, but it helps the
business teams even more. Few things are more expensive than having a
simple project derailed when it could have easily been avoided, or
worse, having a project denied and having to go thru the appeals
process. While having an ARC member on staff doesn't guarantee that
this won't happen, it does seem to happen a lot less to project teams
that are represented at ARC. And I do *not* think this has anything to
do with favoritism at ARC; it has to do with those projects coming to
ARC with a significantly improved level of readiness for ARC.
- Garrett
> -Seb
>
>
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