When a person is in early adolescence they get cramps in their legs and call it growing pains. Later, in adulthood, there's a different kind of pain when the strategies and tactics used to survive adolescence are no longer effective and there's a chafing that won't subside until there's been a change in behavior and expectations; an adaptation to new constraints and realities.

Whatever that is called, we've got it going on in OpenStack, evident in the discussion had in the past week.

OpenStack-wide Goals

There are four proposed OpenStack-wide goals:

• Add Cold upgrades capabilities
• Add Rocky goal to remove mox
• Add Rocky goal to enable mutable configuration
• Add Rocky goal to ensure pagination links

These need to be validated by the community, but they are not getting as much feedback as hoped. There are different theories as to why, from "people are busy", to "people don't feel empowered to comment", to "people don't care". Whatever it is, without input the onus falls on the TC to make choices, increasing the risk that the goals will be perceived as a diktat. As always, we need to work harder to have high fidelity feedback loops. This is especially true in our "mature" phase.

Interop Testing

Despite lots of discussion in email and on the review, the effort to clarify how trademark and interop tests are to be managed remains unresolved. Some discussion today explored whether there is an ordering problem.

I find the whole thing very confusing. People who care about trademark tests should write and review any new ones in a trademark repo that hosts the trademark tempest plugin. Existing tests should migrate or be copied there as time allows. Then the trademark tests have a single responsibility and a single home and we don't have to think so much. People imply that this is crazy, and yes, it requires some effort and has some duplication, but doesn't everything?

Scope of OpenStack Projects

Last Thursday, dhellman started a conversation about what makes an OpenStack project, prompted by Qinling's application to be "official". The adult reality here is stated pretty clearly by Doug:

we used to have 2 options, yes or no. Now we have yes, no, and "let us help you set up your own thing over here"

To some extent gatekeeping projects is the main job of the TC, and now we've made it a bit more confusing.

PTL Balance

In this morning's office hours we had a discussion about ways to help the PTL role (especially of the larger and most active projects) be more manageable and balanced. The main challenge is that as currently constituted, the person in the PTL role often needs to keep the state of the whole project in their head.

That's not sustainable.