[Gluster-devel] Glusterd: A New Hope

[Jeff Darcy]

On 03/24/2013 08:17 PM, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:
> I have the strong impression you are pressed to release something in a
> timeline and for reasons currently untold.
> What is the reason for this rush of features and increasing instability, nfs
> with server-based replication and so on. All things that the original project
> really never talked about.

We're adding features primarily because there are people asking for
them.  No conspiracy theory is necessary.  We're considering things that
we wouldn't have before because more resources and a lot more users than
we did before.

> You would only do this if you had a clear time limit to reach some goal. If
> your goal would be to make a well-defined, stable and long term  GPL project
> really nobody would ask questions like these. Not in the GPL part of the
> software-engineering world.

Really?  Is that because GPL projects are notable for their focus and
orderly progress toward a single goal at a time?  Or is it because no
GPL project has ever refactored, rewritten, or replaced a core
component?  Silly me, I thought open source was about, y'know, being
open - to participation, to experimentation, to people getting involved
and doing something instead of just ranting.  Apparently you have a
different perspective.

FYI, this particular project (refactoring glusterd) is quite long term.
 It's to ensure that at some point in the future we can scale to
clusters ten times larger than now, and support configurations ten times
as complex because of features that are barely on the road map today.
It would be a real shame if people were trying to deploy at that scale
or use those other features but the management layer didn't give them
the tools to make that work.  It's called thinking ahead.

If we were really as nefarious as you make us out to be, we wouldn't be
having this discussion on a public list.  We'd be having it behind
closed doors within Red Hat, but that's not the way we operate.
Instead, I posted this to a public list so people elsewhere in the
community can be involved at the earliest possible point.  It's sad that
some people try to discourage such openness and thereby weaken the
community.  Sometimes the price of leaving the door open is that not
everyone who walks through it is well intentioned, but we just have to
deal with that as best we can.