[chef-dev] RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Nodejs community CK mess

["Zito, Matt" < >]

I agree - it's fine if people want to voluntarily agree to a set of best 
practices and conventions, but the purpose of supermarket is to provide 
unified access to a pool of content.  As soon as people start blessing some 
cookbooks/content over other content based on adherence to rules, it creates 
tricky situations for people who don't want to play ball.

Down the road, too, forcing compliance  to governance and policy rules could 
create a weird set of incentives where whoever is 
elected/appointed/inherits/rules with an iron fist over Supermarket could 
leverage their position to manipulate the "blessed" state of given cookbooks.

It seems like it's better to say that the only governance people have to 
abide by is the "hit by a bus" or "totally unresponsive maintainer" scenario. 
 If you can get ahold of the maintainer, and they just steadfastly refuse to 
update/merge the cookbook, you're free to fork and make your own.  

Along the lines of what another email in the thread suggested, I do think 
that eventually you'll get to "distributions" or "packs" of cookbooks that 
have been compiled to be consistent and stable.  Someone might even make 
money by selling updates, support, customizations of specific cookbooks, 
which is yet another reason to keep Supermarket politically-neutral.   It 
avoids any potential weirdness around penalizing/favoring particular 
distributions of cookbooks over any others.

Thanks,
Matt
________________________________________
From: Noah Kantrowitz 
<
 >
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2014 2:47 PM
To: Chef Dev
Subject: [chef-dev] Re: Re: Re: Re: Nodejs community CK mess

-Inf, I wouldn't want Chef Inc having any formal control over governance of 
my code, nor is my code a democracy, and I would like my stuff to be listed 
as existing. Supermarket is a sharing site, it should not have strong 
opinions like this.

--Noah

On Jul 18, 2014, at 11:44 AM, Cameron Cope 
<
 >
 wrote:

> What do you think about making that governance model a requirement for 
> listing cookbooks on the official Supermarket site? It could help reduce 
> confusion in the community if there were a 1:1:1 relationship of 
> supermarket:namespace:government.
>
> -Cam
>
> On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 2:34 PM, Adam Jacob 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
> We're actively in the process of deciding how we maintain things for Chef 
> proper. Once that is done, I would propose we could look at doing something 
> that basically allows people to "opt-in" to that governance model - where, 
> for example, the author of a community cookbook who intends for it to be 
> "canonical" can choose to adopt the "normal" Chef governance model, and 
> hence have mechanisms for dealing with these cases.
>
> We could then mark cookbooks that have opted in. While it wouldn't make any 
> statements about quality, it would tell you precisely which ones have a 
> stricter central governance model.
>
> Adam
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Cameron Cope 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
> I've heard the statement several times that Chef Software doesn't want to 
> act like a dictator, but it seems tome that the community wants some sort 
> of leadership and organization. I agree that looking at other examples for 
> namespacing might help, but don't just look at the technical details of 
> those systems, research how OSS communities organize and govern themselves. 
> I highly recommend looking at governance in Debian, Ubuntu, and the Apache 
> Foundation. As the corporate backer of Chef, I think it's perfectly 
> reasonable for you guys to decide what your governance model is and how 
> much control your have.
>
> http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/governancemodels
> https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
> http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/governance
> http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html
>
> -Cam
>
> On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 7:52 AM, Christopher Webber 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
> I think this is a great example of something we need to address…
>
> With that said, I have more questions than answers.
>
> The first thing I would do is look to how other communities and package 
> repositories handle this issue. I am on vacation right now and won’t have a 
> chance to do the research myself until I get back, but I really would love 
> to see a good example of how this is handled elsewhere. How do CPAN, NPM, 
> RubyGems, etc handle this?
>
> On a technical level, I think there are a lot more questions that have to 
> be answered. Some of them that come to mind would be:
>
> If we transfer the name to someone else:
> - What requirement do they have to maintain legacy code?
> - What is the expectation around breaking or not breaking the API the 
> cookbook provides, especially if SemVer isn’t in use?
> - Does the license on the old cookbook allow for it to even be maintained?
>
> Since we have talked a lot about namespacing, how would that change this 
> equation? Does it actually solve the problem we are trying to solve? Has it 
> played out that way in other communities that use namespacing like Docker 
> or the Puppet Forge?
>
> The biggest problem in all of this… Who gets to be the decider? How do we 
> do this in a fair manner? It is easy to look at code and have the attitude 
> this sucks, mine is better, but it is much harder to have to explain to 
> someone that this person or group has decided to take a thing away from 
> them. My personal fear is that we discount the people side of this 
> situation. People and feelings are a wicked hard problem set and there 
> really is no good answer. But, as we move forward with any discussion 
> around this, I would love to hear how people think we should handle this 
> part of the equation.
>
> For me, the biggest thing I don’t want to see is Chef Software become the 
> decider and ruler. I want to see it be the community that comes together 
> around a set of values and a process for governance. While I think it is 
> important that Chef Software have a seat at the table and that they take on 
> the responsibility of running the site, I don’t think Chef Software should 
> have the end all say in how we govern things.
>
> Just my 2 cents.
>
> — cwebber
>
> On Jul 18, 2014, at 4:22 AM, 
> <
 >
>  
> <
 >
>  wrote:
>
> > Ohai everyone!
> >
> > We wanted to report an academic example of cookbook governance issues. 
> > Hoping
> > this will further the subject.
> >
> > As everyone know, nodejs is really popular and many of you want to deploy 
> > it
> > for production (maybe with npm packages too).
> > For now a simple search on supermarket give us:
> >    - node
> >    - nodejs
> >    - npm
> >    - node-windows
> >
> > And we may lack some.
> > Moreover, none of them have enough quality and tests for a real production
> > proof system.
> >
> > With our experience, we're trying to rebuild a new cookbook with 
> > experience of
> > each other.
> > Discussion begins here: https://github.com/balbeko/chef-npm/pull/26
> > To federate all this dev, we created a collaborative organization 
> > "REDGUIDE"
> > (https://github.com/redguide) and started fusion and improvement from 
> > existing
> > work.
> >
> > This cookbook (available here: https://github.com/redguide/nodejs ;) is now
> > really good regarding to current chef practices. It also started to be 
> > widely
> > used and known by the community.
> >
> > Final step: publishing it...
> > Here come problems: https://github.com/redguide/nodejs/issues/9
> >
> > TL;DR : Previous maintainer want to keep control over cookbook and to 
> > keep it
> > under his name despite the fact that it is no longer open, active and
> > responsive on this CK
> > (https://github.com/mdxp/nodejs-cookbook/issues?state=open).
> >
> > This decision is really painful for everyone, it blocks all good things 
> > done by
> > community (and block application_nodejs to use it as "depends" for 
> > example).
> >
> > NEXT:
> >    - For this project:
> >       - Press nodejs maintainer to accept the merge and release his 
> > control
> > over community repo (community work belong to the community)
> >       - Creating a yet-another-nodejs cookbook? (or better nodejs-ii, as 
> > we
> > can see for timezone and timezone-ii)
> >       - Destitute maintainer of his role on supermarket (never a good 
> > news to
> > do this)
> >    - For chef:
> >       We really have to manage this kind of case in supermarket. The main
> > risk is that  people/company  who are using community cookbooks  stop 
> > trusting
> > community work anymore, and start writing as much fork/copy (either 
> > public or
> > private) of the same work. Community work would be severely affected by 
> > this.
> >       This is not the way we think Chef should be.
> >
> > Our proposition (but must be debated):
> >    - When someone create a new cookbook on supermarket, a new github repo 
> > is
> > created (like https://github.com/jenkinsci/ do).
> >    - It prevent git erase / modification.
> >    - This repo became the new "central point" for community issues /
> > contributions as it doesn't belong to someone in particular, governancy 
> > can be
> > edicted by getchef/community.
> >
> > We also can provide test platform (for TK for example) easily.
>
>
>
>