On Oct 23, 2012, at 8:57 AM, Erik Dalén <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Thursday 18 October 2012 at 13:33, Luke Kanies wrote: > >> On Oct 18, 2012, at 6:58 AM, Ashley Penney <[email protected] >> (mailto:[email protected])> wrote: >> >>> On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 10:14 PM, Miguel Di Ciurcio Filho >>> <[email protected] (mailto:[email protected])> wrote: >>> >>>> b) Make Puppet a real community project, where the "Puppet Community >>>> Project" (maybe a different name) is the upstream of Puppet Enterprise >>>> or other PuppetLabs projects. Like Citrix did to Xen and CloudStack, >>>> Red Hat does with many other projects KVM, Linux, oVirt, OpenStack is >>>> the upstream for many companies, Samba, Apache HTTP server is part of >>>> many proprietary solutions. The list could go on and on. >>> >>> >>> >>> I think this is probably the only way to stop things from collapsing >>> under the weight of the community expectations at this point. I think >>> opening up commit access to outside developers would be an enormously >>> dangerous, but potentially extremely rewarding, way to go. I know >>> that I've gotten discouraged from my attempts to fix things in facter >>> from the difficulty of getting them merged in and reviewed for large >>> scale changes. >>> >>> Obviously I think if this is the route things go then the addition of >>> developers would have to be carefully controlled at the beginning in >>> order to not have chaos and a blob of code that Puppetlabs themselves >>> can no longer use productively, but it's clear that Puppetlabs simply >>> cannot hire enough developers internally to improve things at the rate >>> that the community wishes for. >> >> >> >> I agree with all of this. We've done a great job of building a >> self-sustaining user community, but we clearly have not delivered that on >> the development side. >> >> There are outside contributors with commit access, but not many, and AFAIK >> they aren't able to spend much time on the project. >> >> I would *love* to have more work on Puppet coming from outside of our >> organization. I've always wanted that, and it's always pained me that we >> never really figured it out. >> >> How do we do this? It's not as simple as just giving a bunch of people >> commit access, is it? > I think trying to be extra speedy with reviewing and giving feedback on > external pull requests would be a great start for this. It might be more time > consuming and slow down development in the short run, but I think it would > give more external contributions and speed up development in the long run. > Basically regarding them as a VIP lane compared to internal ones or something. It turns out that it's fantastically difficult to be extra speedy on all external pull requests. I agree with you that if we could do it, it would eventually result in more contributors, and we're trying to get enough resources right now that we can do so. Some of the pull requests are fundamentally hard, like those for platforms like FreeBSD that we don't have good test infrastructure for or skills in, and external pull requests tend to need a lot more modification and mentoring (e.g., they often have little to no tests), so a given pull request takes a lot longer to get in. Beyond that, we also have business goals of our own, and that requires we actually spend time on our own pull requests. We have someone dedicated each week to external pull requests, and we're looking for more people to work on it, but the needs of the community have clearly outstripped our staffing to meet them (and probably did a long time ago). The awesome part of being a software company is that we can afford to hire developers to work on software that our users want, but the sometimes less than awesome part is that we have to make sure quite a bit of our effort is aligned with being able to actually pay our developers. -- Luke Kanies | http://about.me/lak | http://puppetlabs.com/ | +1-615-594-8199 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-dev?hl=en.
