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

["Julian C. Dunn" < >]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 5:47 PM, Lamont Granquist 
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 wrote:

> I'd still like to see more decentralized management of cookbooks to work
> around the problem of having "The XYZ" cookbook, though.  Still would like
> to see lots of supermarkets rather than just one, and would like to see
> different curated sets of cookbooks with different policies rather than just
> having one system of governance run by ChefInc for cookbooks.

I just don't really see that as realistic. Unless things are really on
fire in the ecosystem, who's going to bother standing up their own
Supermarket? People will say, really, I need to run my own
Rails/Postgres app to serve my version of "nodejs" because the
community couldn't straighten this out?

In reality, only people who want to share cookbooks among their peers
inside a company are likely to run their own Supermarket. And those
won't be public.

> At some point you're going to run into a cookbook author with a strong
> opinion that they're right who is willing to meet the requirements for
> cookbook maintenance and we're right back here.  It also puts ChefInc into
> the role of taking away cookbook authorship of "The XYZ" cookbook from
> existing authors, and that is going to lead to bad feelings on the part of
> someone, and invariably mistakes are going to be made, and angry twitter
> posts will be made.

*Someone* has to govern it. If not ChefCo, then who? At the moment,
there's no "community foundation" like the Fedora Project that
operates at some arms-length from RHT. And we invented a lot of this
ecosystem [1], so I would argue that by default it falls to ChefCo
(and I work here, so I'm pointing the finger at myself too).

At the moment, we're in a bad place, because ChefCo has insisted on
being hands off on this "governance" topic. We should be more
involved. Either that, or devolve governance to a governance body, a
committee, whatever. Issues like cookbook namespacing, namespace
squatting, etc. have smoldered for a long time precisely because we've
been directionless.

- Julian

[1] By which I mean the opscode-cookbooks, Chef itself, Supermarket,
and other tools around Chef

-- 
[ Julian C. Dunn 
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