> > At the end of the day, it comes down to two questions: > > 1) Are there technical and project direction discussions happening off > list and not reflected back to the list? > > 2) If yes, are the concrete decisions being made as a result of the off > list discussions?
> From an Apache standpoint, we have to get the answer to BOTH questions to > a “no” state. That’s a requirement. I don't think these are binary "yes/no" questions. There's a good degree of subtlety here given the complexity of the project and the scope of each individual discussion. On any given code review, there are absolutely technical discussions happening and concrete decisions being made -- that’s the point of code review ;-) However, the vast majority of these are low-level and don't impact the project direction or reach beyond a single component. We should absolutely surface things of interest to the community on the dev@ list, but not every tiny comment, given the scale and scope of the project. It’s just a matter of putting the visibility bar in the right place. All discussions are happening publicly in standard Apache tooling, so the question in my mind is really how do we ensure that each person in the community can sift through all this information to follow the relevant set of things? For example, folks on the Python SDK will quickly be drowned out by details on Java-specific implementation questions, but should absolutely be discussing changes to core concepts. Part of the reason there is so many detailed discussions in Beam is that we choose (for community growth and project quality) to have a review-then-commit workflow. I would imagine this causes additional chatter over projects that do the opposite, where many of these small suggestions might never be surfaced. Said differently, while I totally agree that all significant technical and project discussions should be on the dev@ list, we should not blindly apply a requirement (discussion on dev@) to a level of detail that is not required in the first place (code reviews). My preference would be to keep dev@ for the human-initiated, larger scoped discussions and as a community be accountable to each other for identifying and communicating those. There are definitely things in those >10,000 individual PR comments that could have been handled better -- so let’s proactively surface them, like this thread does. And if there are other ways to help add structure to the visibility in the community, let’s discuss. (I for one would love better ways to keep up with everything!) Frances
