Hi All, I've talked to various developers on the challenges they face in participating in the community and these are issues that I've gathered. I hope this adds to the recent discussions about project bylaws and concerns about community health and collaboration procedure.
> > The biggest issue I believe is CloudStack is too big a project. When you look > at CloudStack, it can really be broken down to five or six different parts > that > can be projects within its own right. I don't want this discussion to turn > into > what those projects are as that should happen on the -dev list, but, just to > give a reference, cloudstack can be broken into orchestration, VR, > automation, template management, acl, UI, and console proxy. Each of > these parts can require special set of knowledge. And to some it can be > broken into even finer parts. > > This leads to the following problems that I often hear when I talk to other > developers. > > - The mailing list is too verbose and is often not about the subject they can > respond to. The problem is they get into a habit of not looking at the > mailing > list because it's often not about what they can respond to but then misses > things that they can respond to. > > - The same problem with the review boards. Most of them don't feel they > understand CloudStack sufficiently to be trolling the review board. > > - Many of them feel insecure about posting designs because the project is > overwhelming. Many of them want to get their designs just right before > posting to the list. > > The second issue is we have not developed a good set of processes for > people to follow. What does it mean to post a design? What does it mean to > fix a bug? How does one participate in a release? Etc. Every bit of > ambiguity > leads to insecurity which leads to inactivity. > > The third issue is lack of confidence in the code they write. For example, > today anything someone writes must be tested with the entire cloudstack > system which means they must know quite a bit of the system to get started. > They can't just say I wrote a plugin and which test driver I should test it > with > to know it will work inside CloudStack. This is different from unit tests. > These are tests that CloudStack community provides to test contracts > between projects but because there's no separate projects today, there's no > such tests being developed. > > Please comment. > --Alex
