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Re: [tracecompass-dev] Vote for Committer status for Jean-Christian Kouame was started by Matthew Khouzam

Thanks for your replies everyone.

The general sentiment seems to be "Well, the nomination process is started now, we can't stop it!". I don't particularly agree with this line of thinking, but
not to the point of veto'ing JC's nomination.

I will reply to everyone in one email, if you don't mind.


On 2016-04-22 09:38 AM, Geneviève Bastien wrote:
> Hi Alex,
>
> This nomination doesn't come "out of the blue". The timing corresponds
> to the submission of the last patch of his biggest contribution so far:
> the XML pattern.

It came out of the blue for us at EfficiOS. Our main reaction was "Why do they
need yet another committer?" and "Why now?". I was vaguely aware that there
was work ongoing to merge his XML stuff, but I was not aware of the current state
of the thing. The project meeting would have been a great occasion to bring
everyone up to speed.

A lot of time was/is put organizing and chairing these project meetings, so
that the communication between the different teams can improve. It'd be a bit
frustrating if they turn out to be useless for very important things, like
adding new people to the list of those who influence the direction of the whole
project.


> It certainly could have been mentioned at the last meeting, given that
> the submission of his patch was imminent. But unfortunately, it wasn't.
> And here is the nomination. Do you really want to postpone it just so we
> can discuss it?

That's more or less what I am doing right now. :)


> But let it be guidelines for the next time a committer is nominated. We
> should not take for granted any committer's vote, especially now that
> there is 3 institutions involved: Ericsson, Poly and Efficios, we cannot
> assume everyone knows what everyone else is doing.

Yes, I completely agree, we should aim for that I don't think we even need
to put it in writing on anything, we should just apply common decency.



On 2016-04-22 10:22 AM, Bernd Hufmann wrote:
> As a last note, for his nomination we applied the same standard that we
> applied when we nominated you as committer back in the Linux Tools project.

Again, I am not questioning the qualifications, only the presentation of the
nomination.

Also, back then (in Linux Tools), all the TMF-related stakeholders were sitting
in the same office. This is not the case anymore.



On 2016-04-22 10:27 AM, Marc-André Laperle wrote:
> Hi Alexandre,
>
> The nomination is (right now) the entire process. The person nominating has the > burden of explaining why the contributor should become a committer, which Matthew > did a good job I think. You can nominate anyone at any moment and the other > committers can voice their opinion through voting or more detailed discussion. > "The election process begins with an existing committer on the same project
> nominating the contributor."
> https://eclipse.org/projects/dev_process/development_process.php#4_1_Committers

I understand. But in practice, as you said, nominations rarely fail and
the process is just a formality at that point. If I was to put a -1 on the
current nomination, how would you all honestly react?

I'd like our process to be open to actual discussions, in theory at least.
Right now if a nomination is sent out, there is no way to ask for more
discussion other than outright nak'ing it before the one-week deadline expires. I just barely mentioned the idea of post-poning it and everyone is up in arms!


> I'm not sure I understand your concern about timing for the rush of the
> release. Having another committer for the Neon rush can only help reviewing
> more things (including your patches!). So I don't see any reason why this
> nomination would be postponed. The only reason I can think of is if you think
> Jean-Christian is not ready to be a committer. Then please vote -1.

An application should, in theory, take some time from the committers, if we
agree that it should not just be a simple formality. However adding more hands
to the pool of people who can do reviews is indeed helpful. The nomination
message could have mentioned that too.


On 2016-04-22 10:31 AM, Matthew Khouzam wrote:
> Hi Alex and all,
>
> As the nominator, I am still learning how to write a good nomination
> message. I don't practice that much believe it or not. :)

To be honest the presentation was quite good! Anyone not knowing JC and his
work already should have been impressed :)


>> Before anything, I want to make it clear that I have *no* doubts about
>> Jean-Christian's technical abilities and capabilities at being a
>> committer. In the proper circumstances I would gladly give him a +1.
>
> If this is the case, what you are doing is using your vote (the last
> one) to delay the process.

This, here, is *exactly* what I'm trying to address. You are making it sound
like this process is a formality, and I'm a bad guy for throwing a wrench into
it.

The process should not be a formality. This (adding new committers) is one of the most important decisions we can make as a project. This is more important
than any individual design decisions, since ultimately it will affect the
results of those future design discussions.

We've involved all committers on some design discussions in the past. Adding
new committers should be on that level at least, it should not be one group of people deciding things on their own. And what's obvious to one group may not be
to another.


> One thing to be careful though with is, if there are hard criteria, we
> may find people min-maxing to meet the criteria.

I'm not saying we should enforce additional criteria or anything. Just that
these things should include all involved parties.


> About the timing? Why is this not ideal? What makes it problematic? Will
> giving JC a vote of confidence right now not be helpful to lessen the
> burden of reviews?

Presented like this, then yes, the timing makes sense since a new committer will
be able to help with the heavy load of ongoing reviews.




That all said, I'd prefer not to disrupt the ongoing process, but I'd like that we at
least take the points enumerated above into consideration in the future.
Geneviève summarized it very well, so I will repeat it:

> But let it be guidelines for the next time a committer is nominated. We
> should not take for granted any committer's vote, especially now that
> there is 3 institutions involved: Ericsson, Poly and Efficios, we cannot
> assume everyone knows what everyone else is doing.



Thanks all,
Alex


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