On Feb 6, 2009, at 4:50 AM, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
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"?
The couchdb community. Right now there are 120 people on #couchdb.
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.
Please tell me more about this brightly drawn line. We should get rid
of it.
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.
So lets see, the PMC doesn't listen to the community and they only do
what I say. Any other choice words for my fellow project members?
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.
I did find it insulting, and I assume the rest of the project has as
well. But I accept you apology and I hope you avoid being insulting in
the future.
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.
No. The changes I am making need to be made regardless. They encompass
much more than just the transaction change.
And furthermore, I don't need to explain myself to the general public
before I write code. To suggest I must get community support before
firing up my editor is silly.
2) Write down a summary of the change you want to make, and why.
ok. I'll have something written next week. As planned.
3) Invite and engage discussion, and give serious consideration to
any that isn't supportive. I think people mean well.
ok. As Planned.
4) In the end, when everyone has had their say, do what you feel is
best.
ok. As Planned.
5) If someone still objects, then decide if that opinion matters.
ok. As Planned.
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. :)
Thank you for the advice. We've never said to anyone that these
decisions where final. Ever. Ever. Ever. I fact, we explicitly talked
about provisions to reverse it, to leave in the capability in case we
must keep the feature in.
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.
Then why are you being so combative and insulting to our team? We have
been nothing but open and willing to work with people. The only
complaint is that I didn't run some stuff over the mailing list before
writing code. I haven't checked in anything yet, and I won't until
we've had more discussion, review and testing. This problem is a non-
issue,
-Damien
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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