[Server-devel] [XSCE] A couple of thoughts about moving forward.

[David Farning]

On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 6:49 AM, George Hunt <georgejhunt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 9:47 PM, David Farning
> <dfarning at activitycentral.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hey all,
>>
>> I would like to offer some reflections after the last couple of weeks.
>>
>> I stepped aside because I felt I was hindering the project more than
>> helping it. I spent years being frustrated by Langoff's hold on
>> OLPC-XS. Then after less than 8 months I found myself controlling the
>> funding for the 6 person DXS team, creating the roadmap & project
>> specification, and doing much of the external communication. All of
>> this while receiving dozens of emails and calls per week from
>> deployments pressuring me to make XSCE and DXS different from what the
>> core XSCE team was interested in doing.
>
>
> My shortcomings may have caused a split between  XSCE and DXS.  When David
> and I were discussing whether Ansible should be part of 0.4 XSCE, I felt a
> fear of creating a situation I have created many times before, in my life as
> a programmer. I tend to add more complexity than I have brain power to sort
> out during the debugging phase.
>
> So, now David has moved forward with DXS, with an aggressive schedule,
> adding features based upon customers requirements. And when he wants to
> incorporate DXS into the next revision, XSCE 0.5, the fear crops up again. I
> need help dealing with my fear of complexity. Are there any volunteers?
>
> In a sense it's the Red Hat, Fedora situation with a twist. The quick
> turnaround, feature development test bed, is the commercial enterprise. The
> volunteer, community based, effort is the slower moving, and more
> conservative.
>
> So now, our history, becomes our handicap. XSCE has not asked for much help
> from the people and the accumulated wisdom available on server-devel. But
> now I think we need that perspective.
>
> I don't want to have a "hold" on XSCE. I'm feeling like I need to pass the
> baton to someone, or a group of someones.  I've been working hard at a
> volunteer job, and there just are no more hours in the day that I'm willing
> to devote to the XSCE enterprise.

Nine months ago I recommended you as release manager for XSCE and I
stand by that recommendation today.... even though it has meant the AC
lead Ansible work has lived out of tree for the last couple of months.

The release manager has a tough (some might say impossible) job in
community project. In a thriving community there will be a million
people all clamoring that their work be committed NOW. The release
manager must weigh the pros and cons before accepting a patch
especially when it is significant.

In this case you and Jerry said 'hold on, I don't see the value in
this ansible stuff." That was the right decision at the time. It is
the branch authors responsibility to prove the value of their work.
Anish et. al. put their heads down and translate xs-conf to ansible.

My reasoning for personally stepping back from participation in XSCE
was to ensure credibility in the XSCE decision making process. I
believe that porting xsce to ansible is the best way forward for the
ecosystem, XSCE and AC. However, if it appeared that I was using my
roles within XSCE to push an external agenda, XSCE would forever be
tainted.

As george says, there are a lot of skilled people reading these lists.
Is Anyone willing to step up and help ensure that we have a neutral
community that balances the (often passionate) needs of school server
developers, deployers, and users.



> George
>
>>
>> It was not a recipe for community success :( So, I spent the last
>> couple of weeks regrouping. If anyone has any suggestions for how they
>> think I can help the community without becoming too smothering please
>> let me know.
>>
>> I have been a little concerned about the relationship between the XSCE
>> team and the DXS team. We put a pretty intense deadline of mid Oct for
>> delivering commercially supported Dextrose Server. The goal of this
>> division was to ensure the upstream XSCE team had the freedom to
>> scratch their own itches while ensuring the downstream DXS team was
>> focused on specific customer requirements. As a side effect it feels
>> like there has become a gap between the teams.
>>
>> I would like to encourage Anna to step into the role of liaison
>> between the two team. She can make sure that everyone is aware of what
>> is happening.
>>
>> External communications hit a couple of rough patches over the past
>> couple of weeks. While keeping the signal to noise ratio high, the use
>> of a semi-private mailing list seemed to be hindering external
>> awareness of what we were doing. Rather than ask the project to
>> change, I decided to unsubscribe from this list and only remain
>> subscribed to the server-devel list. The goal was to see how the
>> projects was seen from the outside.
>>
>> My takeaway is that we should start to shift as many technical threads
>> as possible to server-devel, there is a wealth of knowledge on that
>> list. On planning and organization issues, the noise(passion) on
>> server-devel might still might be a bit high for a young community
>> like XSCE to handle without getting bogged down. I would suggest
>> revisiting this decision one month prior to the release of 0.5.
>>
>> Good work everyone. Adolescents is a tough time for everyone
>> especially community projects :)
>>
>> --
>> David Farning
>> Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com
>
>



-- 
David Farning
Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com