I had to think about this for a day...
On Feb 5, 2009, at 8:34 AM, Damien Katz wrote:
On Feb 5, 2009, at 6:14 AM, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
[sending second time, as I see my first is stuck in moderation, and
I want to reply in a timely manner]
Sure, ideally.
But you can't have "everyone" together at the same time on IRC,
where at the ASF, we define "everyone" to be, well, "everyone", not
you and the 4 others on the PMC.
I see 579 people on the user list. I see 294 people on the dev
list. Just focusing on the dev list, that's 290 people, or 98.6%
of people supposedly interested in CouchDB development, that had
zero opportunity to see, review and participate in the discussion.
Further, there's now zero chance that any future project
participant can look back to understand design decision and
philosophy. No institutional memory. Your goal, besides building
a great software project, should be to get the community to the
point where you can step back and do other things w/o material
effect on the community, and that requires information like this to
be somewhere accessible.
And unlike Ted, I don't agree that a pointer to an IRC log is
sufficient to represent a "done decision", and he may not have
meant that anyway. Sure, I can see a chat starting on IRC about a
topic, but I'd hope that one person would force the move from IRC
to the mail list - and at that point, maybe posting a pointer to
the *initial* discussion log would be useful. And after that,
discussion is on the mail list.
I think IRC logs are a very poor substitute to mail traffic (and
yes, I grok the downside of async communications). A primary one
reason that they are very "in the moment" - if you are in the
conversation, it's easy to stay in, but after, when things cool and
the context of the moment isn't there, it's neigh impossible. You
also can't hit reply and quote a piece for others to see and
discuss, further broadening the discussion.
We get a lot of value out of IRC.
At a high price, IMO. And who is "we"? This may hint at one of my
biggest concerns here, the balkanization of the PMC from the rest of
the community. I don't think I've ever seen a project where the
dividing line between the PMC and the rest of the community was so
often and brightly drawn. The PMC is a *legal* mechanism through with
decisions and governance of the project become decisions of the ASF as
a corporation. IMO (and this is only my personal opinion), the wall
between PMC and committers, or PMC and community should be as
invisible as possible. Yes, only the PMCs votes are binding. But if
you want to build a broad, deep and sustaining community, people need
to feel they have a voice, even if it's advisory only.
We are going to discuss this on the ML. I was waiting until I got
the patch work to talk about all the implications and how we'd set
the flags and modes of operation and all the implications. The code
is going to get more powerful, the plan is for the feature to go
away, not the capability. If we decided the feature was too
important, we'll put it back. But as it stands, the changes to the
code that I'm making now all need to be made regardless if we change
the feature or not.
I hope you can understand my confusion over this, as this is what I
was reading yesterday :
On Feb 4, 2009, at 9:13 PM, Damien Katz wrote:
Geir, there was a decision made by the PMCs to change the
transaction model to support partitioned databases. It is a change I
am currently working on.
So what's going to be discussed? flags? I can sorta guess how this
is going to play out - you're going to do the work, commit the code,
and then ask for a salute from a PMC that from my POV tends to
salute. At that point, people won't dare speak up since they'll feel
like it's futile.
And I apologize in advance to any other PMC member that is insulted by
what I wrote - I intend no offense - but it *is* my perception (and
I'm fairly sure the perception of others) that is how things work at
the moment. There's a comment later in this thread where Chris
describes his role as ... well, for lack of better words, your
handler, to shield you from the community. Things like that feed my
perception. More on that later.
I have an idea :
1) Stop coding.
2) Write down a summary of the change you want to make, and why.
3) Invite and engage discussion, and give serious consideration to any
that isn't supportive. I think people mean well.
4) In the end, when everyone has had their say, do what you feel is
best.
5) If someone still objects, then decide if that opinion matters.
And when I say "matters", I don't mean only in the "Is the vote
binding?" sense. You'll have to take into account technical
relevance, how this affects the perception of the project as a whole,
etc. It's complicated, but anything involving humans tends to be. :)
At that point, you could continue as you want, reverse direction,
discuss more, call for a vote, etc. But it's not clear that you're
anywhere near that point already.
To be fair, I've found you to be open - e.g. our discussion regarding
the reality around durability - which is why I'm spending the time
proposing this.
What got me engaged on this wasn't the decision itself (only
because it was a secret decision), but -like Ted - the mode of
operation. It seemed that a very dedicated, engaged and interested
community member had to privately petition the PMC for redress on a
technical decision that none of us had any awareness of, nor a
chance to review. And IMO, from a guy that probably should be a
committer and PMC member to boot!
He mailed us privately. Now he's mailed us publicly.
Any discussion about Antony being involved with the project should
probably be private.
Indeed! I'm on the list.
geir
-Damien
(By the way - from my count, not all PMC members are even on the
PMC's private@ list, so I have *no clue* where project private
discussion - like new committer candidates - are even discussed....)
geir
On Feb 5, 2009, at 2:11 AM, Damien Katz wrote:
Ideally yes, but real time communication with everyone together is
damn useful.
-Damien
On Feb 5, 2009, at 2:07 AM, Ted Leung wrote:
Uh, project decisions are supposed to be made in the public
mailing lists...
Ted
On Feb 4, 2009, at 6:51 PM, Damien Katz wrote:
This decision was discussed and made on IRC.
-Damien
On Feb 4, 2009, at 9:26 PM, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
can you point me to a reference to where the PMC made this
decision?
I'm interested in the subject for it's own sake, and I'm also
interested in figuring out where decisions are made in this
project, since I didn't see this one go by on a mail list.
geir
On Feb 4, 2009, at 9:13 PM, Damien Katz wrote:
Geir, there was a decision made by the PMCs to change the
transaction model to support partitioned databases. It is a
change I am currently working on.
-Damien
On Feb 4, 2009, at 8:46 PM, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
and original question #2?
geir
On Feb 4, 2009, at 8:38 PM, Antony Blakey wrote:
On 05/02/2009, at 12:02 PM, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
1) where is this being forwarded from ?
I sent it to the PMC.
Antony Blakey
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