[Gluster-Maintainers] Community Transparency [Was: Responsibilities and expectations of our maintainers]

[Niels de Vos]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 12:39:39AM -0400, Krishnan Parthasarathi wrote:
> 
> > Currently, we need more attention to the way of working, in and with,
> > the community and see how to increase the outreach of all the work we
> > are doing, else we may induce estrangement in this space.
> > 
> 
> Yes. We could improve our engagement during design proposals. Oftentimes, there
> is an announcement style mail and then the commit.

More often than not, I do not see an announcement style email. We only
seem to do that for bigger changes, not smaller ones or things that are
contained to only one component.

I would really encourage anyone that has non-public discussions
(meeting in an office, private IRC chats, phone calls, ...) to send an
email with at least a summary to the -devel list. And that is, for
*ANYTHING* technically that gets discussed, small or big.

I regularly review patches and get responses in a comment referring to a
discussion that has taken place, but was not documented. Questions or
alternative suggestions about the proposed solution have often been
discussed before the development was done. It feels like a waste of (my)
time to point out or ask things that others did already too.

My stand is, that when a discussion has not been done in the upstream
community, the discussion did not take place. Please help reminding
other developers to share emails (or even in the commit message or BZ)
that include a problem description, possible solutions and decided path
forward.

The more technical information that flows through the -devel list, the
easier it will be to attract new contributors. We should encourage
technical discussions, it makes it much more inviting for others to join
in.

Thanks,
Niels