Thanks for the reply Todd. Unfortunately it's more systematic than that. Apologies for top post but am on my phone. Couple points:
- interested to hear from others besides you on this. No offense but I think it's important that project members send email here to reply. - I hand counted the 4 threads of interest. Didn't run a fancy command but to be honest it's more indicative of the broader issue. Things aren't always solved through fancy greps and tools like gerrit. This is going to be a core issue with Kudu's incubation - how is someone not sitting in a cube working on the project who isn't on those tools like gerrit and slack which don't exist at the ASF going to join on the project? - Even considering 40 threads I doubt there have only be <= 40 *decisions* on the project to date. IOW they are being made somewhere but it's unclear where. Email is easy to follow on a phone on the go whatever. As a mentor I would not be comfortable with Kudu being a TLP at this point bc frankly projects need to use their dev list for more than automated discussion and big reports. Simple as that and sending a transcript of where convo is happening elsewhere is not going to cut it unfortunately. Email is slow and deliberate and not as fast or slick as gerrit etc, but that's a good thing. It allows people the time needed to read and join an OSS community. It's too hard to do that with Kudu right now. Cheers, Chris Sent from my iPhone > On Mar 9, 2016, at 6:46 PM, Todd Lipcon <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hey Chris, > > Responses inline: > > On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 6:08 PM, Mattmann, Chris A (3980) < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi Team, >> >> I looked at: >> >> https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-kudu-dev >> >> And over the last 4 months and Kudu’s inception, we have had >> well over 2k+ emails, and looking back I found 4 actual threads >> during that time (and one of which was a release VOTE thread) >> that wasn’t automatically generated by Gerrit. >> >> Mar 2016 438 >> Feb 2016 1003 >> Jan 2016 1143 >> Dec 2015 12 > > Hmm, I did a search in my inbox for: [email protected] -gerrit > -jira -"git commit" -dev-help -"svn commit" -moderate -"git push summary" > and counted 30-35 threads. You're right, of course, that JIRA and gerrit > eclipse the amount of email discussion, though. > > >> >> >> If we are going to become an ASF top level project, the project >> discussion has to happen on the mailing list. We had similar >> issues in Spark and I realize that lots of project work is assisted >> by tools and other technologies, but at the ASF, “if it didn’t >> happen on the mailing list, it didn’t happen.” More-over it’s hard >> to parse signal from noise in all these automated messages. Frankly >> I don’t really know if anything good is going on - I know things >> are going on, and I assume they are good, but it’s extremely hard >> to verify that. > > I think it's worth noting that the "automated' messages are typically code > review requests and responses, which are developer discussion. Our > project's culture is usually to use JIRAs and/or 'work-in-progress' patches > in gerrit to communicate when we find a bug or want an opinion on > something. For example, today I found a new bug > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KUDU-1369 and wrote up a quick > work-in-progress for a a proposed solution and put it up at > http://gerrit.cloudera.org:8080/#/c/2514/ . I think it would be redundant > to also send an email to the list saying "Hey guys, I found a bug, here's a > description". > > The same goes for design discussion -- eg > http://gerrit.cloudera.org:8080/#/c/2443/ is a recent gerrit post that Dan > made for a new feature he's working on. In this case he also sent an email > to the dev list to point out the gerrit in case anyone missed it. I imagine > a lot of people would filter the gerrit emails out of their inbox but not > direct emails to the list (gerrit provides both headers and a subject line > tag to make it easy to do) > > In terms of daily dev discussion, most of it has been happening on our > Slack -- eg earlier today three contributors were discussing in-progress > efforts on Spark RDD integration and sharing code via that channel. Most of > the community members we've seen so far have tended to prefer this quick > back-and-forth for discussion. > > Of course any _decisions_ will be made on the mailing list. If you think it > would be useful to send a daily slack log to the mailing list, we can do > that as well. > > > >> >> I have a possible suggestions: >> >> * Create a [email protected] and send all automated >> traffic there. *-issues is one option; we could make another name for >> it. > > Sure, we could do that. But, isn't it just as easy for people to set up a > filter for 'kudu-CR' if they want to move those messages elsewhere? Our > initial motivation when setting up mailing lists was to avoid having too > many (makes it a pain for people to subscribe to them all). > > >> >> That will help to separate the signal from the noise in terms of >> dev/architectural/etc. discussions from code reviews and automated >> commit messages. >> >> One thing you may say is that dev/architectural discussions are happening >> but they are in Gerrit. I would then say it’s extremely difficult to >> separate the signal from the noise here, and as such, could be contributing >> towards making it difficult for others to join the project, something >> that we identified as an issue in our Incubator report. > > Right. One option is that, for patches with bigger discussion, we can add a > gerrit "reviewer" which is actually the dev mailing list. This would cause > the discussion to be CCed there, and bring it to the attention of more > people. Another thought is to do as you suggest above and move gerrit > elsewhere, and just have a policy that whenever any gerrit starts getting > architectural, that we send a ping to the dev mailing list to point it out > (as Dan did with his recent design doc). > > -Todd
