node.js and io.js reconciliation

[Boris Matos Morillo]

First of all I would like to quote an article I read on the official blog of node.js: "Listening to the Community", after reading this I decided to write this.

In these last days appeared a fork of nodejs called iojs, which looked very serious to bring the project to another course, when I saw this I was stunned, because this would open the possibility that the community behind nodejs eventually split into two.

Apparently iojs was born due to complaints from some contributors about the way in which the project is being handled (this includes the lack of new contributors and releases, because the project isn't truly community-driven)

Given all this, the questions I ask myself are:

why joyent not decides to put nodejs in a foundation with open governance?

why not make everyone happy?

why not move nodejs with one solid effort from the community?

IMHO split the community in two is the worst that could happen to nodejs (and all javascript developers).

[// ravi]

On Dec 6, 2014, at 12:04 AM, // ravi <ravi-...@g8o.net> wrote:
>
> It’s the “apparently”s that bother me. I feel like one among the proverbial blind men trying to figure out an elephant. The blog post you linked to suggests comments be posted to this list, but the blog post (or its contents) itself was not posted to this list! A few weeks ago I heard of node-forward. Today I hear about io.js (the members of this organisation on GitHub are apparently — there’s that word again — private).
>
> As a user of NodeJS, I have absolutely no basis on which to make any productive comments. I am mildly, vaguely and belatedly aware of efforts that seem to spring up out of nowhere. I am even lesser aware of the motivation and need for these efforts. To mix my metaphors, is it worth bikeshedding after the bike has left the shed?
>


I should add that once I did hear of node-forward and signed on to Gitter, Forrest was generous in explaining the effort to me, and my thanks are owed to him for that.


> P.S: Isaac’s was a voice of reason that I could rely on, but he seems to have gone silent, somewhat understandably, since he forked off into the NPM effort.


And while I am on the taking foot out of my mouth track: the above is not to suggest that current maintainers, moderators and contributors are in any way not appreciated for their efforts.


—ravi

[// ravi]

On Dec 5, 2014, at 11:46 PM, Boris Matos Morillo <bjrm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> First of all I would like to quote an article I read on the official blog of node.js: "Listening to the Community", after reading this I decided to write this.
>
> In these last days appeared a fork of nodejs called iojs, which looked very serious to bring the project to another course, when I saw this I was stunned, because this would open the possibility that the community behind nodejs eventually split into two.
>
> Apparently iojs was born due to complaints from some contributors about the way in which the project is being handled (this includes the lack of new contributors and releases, because the project isn't truly community-driven)
>

It’s the “apparently”s that bother me. I feel like one among the proverbial blind men trying to figure out an elephant. The blog post you linked to suggests comments be posted to this list, but the blog post (or its contents) itself was not posted to this list! A few weeks ago I heard of node-forward. Today I hear about io.js (the members of this organisation on GitHub are apparently — there’s that word again — private).

As a user of NodeJS, I have absolutely no basis on which to make any productive comments. I am mildly, vaguely and belatedly aware of efforts that seem to spring up out of nowhere. I am even lesser aware of the motivation and need for these efforts. To mix my metaphors, is it worth bikeshedding after the bike has left the shed?

—ravi

P.S: Isaac’s was a voice of reason that I could rely on, but he seems to have gone silent, somewhat understandably, since he forked off into the NPM effort.

[Forrest Norvell]

I can shed a little more light on what’s going on. Keep in mind that while I work for a company (npm, Inc.) that has someone in the middle of a lot of the discussions around Node’s governance, and while I’m connected in various ways to both node-forward and io.js, I’m not a member of the Node core team, nor am I speaking in an official capacity on behalf of any of Joyent, the Node.js core team / the io.js Technical Committee, or npm, Inc. As such, I’m just going to stick to the facts.

why joyent not decides to put nodejs in a foundation with open governance?

Joyent has responded to concerns about Node.js expressed by the community and Node’s corporate stakeholders by forming the Joyent Node.js Advisory Board (JNAB). The members of the board are drawn from a wide variety of organizations (most of them companies) with an interest in Node’s future.

why not make everyone happy?

This isn’t a question with an objective answer, but I do think it’s uncontroversial to say that recent discussions around the future of Node have been conducted in the spirit of finding a resolution that is satisfactory for everyone, and those discussions are still in progress.

why not move nodejs with one solid effort from the community?

If you look at the io.js list of contributors and compare it to the official Node.js core team list, you will note that the two are almost identical. Mikeal Rogers and a few others created node-forward to unify community efforts related to Node as a single, combined effort controlled by the community itself. This is not to deny the reality of the fork, but to point out that the fork is not due to a desire to see the platform diverge.

The blog post you linked to suggests comments be posted to this list, but the blog post (or its contents) itself was not posted to this list!

That raised my eyebrows as well, but this is a perfectly fine place to have these discussions (as long as we all keep our heads), along with node-forward’s discussions repo and the various Gitters connected to node-forward and io.js.

Today I hear about io.js (the members of this organisation on GitHub are apparently — there’s that word again — private).

Fedor Indutny created the iojs/io.js repository as a place where the io.js core team could do their work in the open; I can’t speak on Fedor’s behalf, but I don’t think there’s any intention to be secretive about who’s a part of io.js – just look at its CONTRIBUTING.md and io.js’s list of issues to get a feel for who’s doing what on the project.

Isaac’s was a voice of reason that I could rely on, but he seems to have gone silent, somewhat understandably, since he forked off into the NPM effort.

Isaac has been deeply involved in the JNAB discussions, as well as participating in both node-forward and io.js discussions, and will publish a post discussing what’s going on soon.

I should add that once I did hear of node-forward and signed on to Gitter, Forrest was generous in explaining the effort to me

As this should make clear, I’m happy to explain what I can about recent events, but it shouldn’t be surprising, in light of the existence of a fork, that there are sensitive discussions going on, and that everyone involved has good reasons to be circumspect. It’s really not out of a desire to run things via a shadowy cabal – I’m keenly aware how frustrating it must be to have to find out about stuff like this via articles in the tech press. My hope is that over the next few weeks, most of your questions will get answered.

F

​

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[Boris Matos Morillo]

Thanks for your response. I'll keep waiting what happens in the next weeks, hoping all of this comes with a solution that is satisfactory for everyone.

[// ravi]

I appreciate your detailed response Forrest. Perhaps it would also help to clarify what to expect and where to go for help. Example:

Use:

* joyent/node GitHub issues for confirmed bugs in Node core
* This list for discussion of general Node issues, technical and otherwise
* Gitter for quick one-time help requests
* node-forward on GitHub for user help documents
* ….

(the above is an example, and does not imply that they are the actual or preferred usage for these media :-))

—ravi

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

Here is the forking issue being discussed on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8716966

And here is the original blog post that sparked the discussion.

http://wesleyio.tumblr.com/post/104637877991/node-js-is-forked-not-f-ed

I, for one, breathe a little easier now that these things are out in the
open. The world is not ending, after all.

– Harald

[// ravi]

On Dec 8, 2014, at 2:12 PM, Harald Hanche-Olsen <han...@math.ntnu.no> wrote:
>
> And here is the original blog post that sparked the discussion.
>
> http://wesleyio.tumblr.com/post/104637877991/node-js-is-forked-not-f-ed
>

Where in we read: "Now, some people will scream about fragmentation”. People do not scream about fragmentation, they worry about it. And it is a very legitimate worry.

The author of the above post has written well but the point, as he acknowledges, is an old one:

"This is precisely the beauty of open source. Iojs makes something awesome, and the guys at nodejs copy the feature. The reverse situation could also happen. This idea that there are ‘tribes’ within open source is quite silly. Either party can copy the other at any time. If anything, their competitiveness may increase the quality of both pieces of software.”

The idea is that by enabling developers or groups of developers to branch the project as they see fit, simultaneously, we increase developer freedom, which in turn leads to competition that lets the best branch rise to the top, thus benefitting the user.

It looks good in theory. In reality, it does increase developer freedom (hence the near universal love for the fork’ing model from developers involved), the gains for the user (in this case, other developers) is dubious or at least arguable. For one thing, there is information asymmetry: # of open issues, # of committers, etc, have been offered as measures of a project’s popularity, but they are crude measures, and trivially useless when it comes to new forks. What the user (again, in this case those building NodeJS or other Open Source based applications), especially new users, are left with is a confusing array of choices and no expertise to choose among them.

I do not argue that this particular fork (or set of forks) is a bad one. I do not know enough to even remotely answer that. What I do think is that there is no predetermined rule by which all forking is good. Node is far from f*cked. But whether it will benefit, or rather, whether I as a user of NodeJS will benefit from the current churn remains, at least to me, to be seen.

Regards,

—ravi

[Ryan Schmidt]

I am subscribed to this discussion group in order to be connected with the community of other nodejs developers and to learn about important new developments affecting the nodejs community. I think having core nodejs contributors leave and start their own fork would qualify.

On the Node Forward web site [1] it says "Node Forward is a broad community effort to improve Node, JavaScript, and their ecosystem through open collaboration"

In an Info World interview about the iojs fork [2] Mikeal Rogers says "We've been working with Joyent since July to try and move the project to a structure where the contributors and community can step in and effectively solve the problems facing Node"

How can there be "a broad community effort", how can there be "open collaboration", how can the "community step in and effectively solve the problems" if the existence of these efforts is not announced to the community--this community right here on this discussion group? I feel very out of the loop reading a thread titled "node.js and io.js reconciliation" when previously I was not aware of the existence of io.js nor the issues that prompted its creation.



[1] http://nodeforward.org
[2] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2855057/application-development/why-iojs-decided-to-fork-nodejs.html

[Aria Stewart]

> On 9 Dec 2014, at 04:26, Ryan Schmidt <googl...@ryandesign.com> wrote:
>
>
> How can there be "a broad community effort", how can there be "open collaboration", how can the "community step in and effectively solve the problems" if the existence of these efforts is not announced to the community--this community right here on this discussion group? I feel very out of the loop reading a thread titled "node.js and io.js reconciliation" when previously I was not aware of the existence of io.js nor the issues that prompted its creation.
>

Because the community around node is much, much bigger than this mailing list. It's conferences and events, twitter conversations and blog posts all over the web. It's IRC conversations chat on Gitter and It's conversations on Reddit and Stack Overflow. Not everything happens here!

[// ravi]

Not to be combative, but surely you are not suggesting that every one of us jump on Twitter, Reddit, SO, IRC, Gitter, find money to attend conferences and events, so on? Mailing lists (and Usenet, RIP), traditionally, have worked very well on the Internet as a general gathering place (for occasional quick consensus?, if not running code)… everything need not happen here, but it would be nice if everything was pointed to here, or in one blessed forum/medium. Of course even if there is agreement on that, there may be no one person or group that is all-knowing and therefore capable of taking on that role. Which is the problem with fragmentation.

Without in any way meaning to sound resentful, I think the situation, as it is in other spheres of life (politics?!), is that there are tiers within the “community". I do not contribute to Core, I do not have the money and resources to attend conferences and events, etc, and so I expect to be less informed and have a lesser say on the future of the project. In the past, on the Internet, the use of mailing lists masked this to some extent, so there is the understandable hold out or hope that this mailing list can play a similar role.

And as has been explained, I guess this particular event is a bit complex and sensitive, so there is not full transparency. I do not condone the lack of transparency but I accept it is what it is.

—ravi

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 9, 2014, at 9:02 AM, Aria Stewart wrote:

> On 9 Dec 2014, at 04:26, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> How can there be "a broad community effort", how can there be "open collaboration", how can the "community step in and effectively solve the problems" if the existence of these efforts is not announced to the community--this community right here on this discussion group? I feel very out of the loop reading a thread titled "node.js and io.js reconciliation" when previously I was not aware of the existence of io.js nor the issues that prompted its creation.
>
> Because the community around node is much, much bigger than this mailing list. It's conferences and events, twitter conversations and blog posts all over the web. It's IRC conversations chat on Gitter and It's conversations on Reddit and Stack Overflow. Not everything happens here!

While I'm sure all of those are valuable in their own way, the mailing list is the only medium that delivers information to my mailbox without me having to go out and look for it.

[Stephen Belanger]

The node community is huge. If everyone just communicated via the mailing list, it'd be an unfollowable firehose of noise.

Between IRC and the mailing list, you can get most things. Twitter sometimes gets you early info about new stuff particular people are working on. Conferences are really efficient for learning about new stuff going on, and listening to the back conversations, but are ultimately not necessary to keep up reasonably well.

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[// ravi]

On Dec 9, 2014, at 1:36 PM, Stephen Belanger <ad...@stephenbelanger.com> wrote:
>
> The node community is huge. If everyone just communicated via the mailing list, it'd be an unfollowable firehose of noise.
>

At the risk of belabouring the point:

I somewhat agree, but then again, mailing lists are particularly well-suited for this sort of firehose: email buffers up messages nicely (unlike IRC) when one is not online, it has sophisticated desktop clients providing capabilities to filter, sort, and otherwise manage messages; email is threaded (or threadable) so one can somewhat easily opt out of a conversation that is not of interest.

I do not think or claim mailing lists can be a catchall… IRC, etc, work great for instant/real-time communication, which is a necessary component of such projects. Bug reports (oops sorry Issue reports :-)) are a great way to capture and act on that sort of information. So on.

I think perhaps Ryan’s point(*) (and I guess mine as well!) is that there is probably a better middle ground between fire-hosing everything to the mailing list and its current function as a sporadic newbie Q/A forum (<— which is a great function and is not being disparaged). It would be nice if some vested party had posted a note here saying “Hey, we started an effort called node-forward, more info at: …” or “Learn about the community fork of NodeJS, IoJS, at: …”, etc. Maybe such posts were made and I missed them, so apologies if so.

I’ll try to keep this my last post on this matter, especially since I am sort of arguing against nobody. It’s not like anyone or group in particular is hiding information from me. Maybe I am arguing against the Second Law of Thermodynamics? :-) (<— not a serious Physics reference).

—ravi


(*) not trying to speak for him.

[Dick Hardt]

+1 that significant events such as forking would have a post on this mail list.

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[Matt]

Ravi,

I highly recommend you subscribe to nodeweekly - it's a weekly roundup of node news where you'll at least get to hear about this stuff.

http://nodeweekly.com/

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[Stephen Belanger]

Joyent is already unhappy about all this. An "official" thread on here would probably not be well received, and iojs is trying really hard not to get on Joyent's bad side.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nodejs/CAD9ie-u5N5fhenR4A5qcrJaG_O_0i8uP8UpxCU_DCMZk09QSmw%40mail.gmail.com.

[// ravi]

On Dec 9, 2014, at 2:09 PM, Matt <hel...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ravi,
>
> I highly recommend you subscribe to nodeweekly - it's a weekly roundup of node news where you'll at least get to hear about this stuff.
>
> http://nodeweekly.com/
>

Done! Thank you for sharing that,

—ravi

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 9, 2014, at 1:09 PM, Matt wrote:

> I highly recommend you subscribe to nodeweekly - it's a weekly roundup of node news where you'll at least get to hear about this stuff.
>
> http://nodeweekly.com/

Done. I'll point out that this, too, is a resource that has never been mentioned here before. (Why hasn't it?)

[Forrest Norvell]

Because nobody's mentioned it. I don't say this to be a smartass – this group is a community resource, and, putting on my moderator hat for a second, it's run with a pretty light hand. The addition of Aria as a moderator (which I probably should have announced, and I apologize for not doing so) has made the lag time between posting and approval much lower, so the friction to get a message in front of the group's users is about the same as it's always been. If stuff isn't showing up here, it's because nobody's seen it as being worth sharing with the group. That's on all of us.

As I said in my earlier post on this thread, I understand how frustrating it must be to learn about potentially transformational events around Node in such an incomplete and tardy way. It frustrates me, and I'm better informed than many due to my job and my location. A year or two ago, it would have been much easier for everyone to stay on top of things, because a lot (if not most) of the engaged members of the community were all using this group.

However, that isn't the case anymore. There are a bunch of reasons for that – the many flame wars at the end of last year that led to me volunteering to moderate the mailing list were the last straw for many former group members that I've talked to; others just don't see the value of old-school mailing lists, or email period – but the reality is that there's now many Node communities doing many different things with the platform, and if you want to keep tabs on more than a few, it's going to take some work.

This is both unfortunate (and a little sad) and a consequence of Node's success – to pick one example I'm familiar with, there's enough happening with NodeBots that an entire community can have its own meetups (and even conferences) without really needing to interact much with the rest of the Node world. My friends in that community aren't preoccupied with the fork because Node already does what they need, more or less. And NodeBots is just the most obvious, self-contained example. Node is *big*, and it's natural for it to sort out into more manageable communities.

And yes, it does suck that the larger community only found out about the fork so late in the game. But Aria and Stephen have already pointed to what's been going on – while I think things are in an OK place right now, there's been a lot of negotiation and politicking that's led to this point, and there have been many explicit requests to keep those discussions private and restricted to the parties involved. I agree that the community should be leading these discussions instead of following them, and all I can really say is that the people to whom you should be addressing your questions and concerns are not active participants of this group.

F

[Dave Horton]

Putting all of the political discussion to one side (I don't find it that interesting, and I am not one that is concerned the sky is falling because of this fork) I have one very simple tactical question: 

   what are the considerations that a developer might have in deciding to switch from nodejs to iojs ?  

Perhaps its too early to even get an answer to that, due to the fact that the new org seems to be currently shrouded in some of kind well-intentioned cone of silence as they try (pointlessly, it seems to me) not to piss of joyent and be able to point to some theoretical future where the toothpaste might all go back in the tube.

But if they want a viable product and org, then they need users and supporters.  To get users they have to educate them about why this product is right for them.  If they are not ready for that -- not ready to really have people join the community -- then they should say so.  Otherwise, they should get on with providing more details so people like me can self-select whether this project/community is for them.

[Ben Noordhuis]

I wouldn't say there is a cone of silence, it's merely low key at this
point. To answer your question about why someone would want to
switch, let me quip from the README:

"This repository began as a GitHub fork of joyent/node. io.js
contributions, releases, and contributorship are under an open
governance model. We intend to land, with increasing regularity,
releases which are compatible with the npm ecosystem that has been
built to date for node.js."

In other words, the goal is to put out releases that are compatible
with joyent/node, only more frequently. That includes bug fixes,
security fixes, new features, more and better support for different
platforms and architectures, etc.

The reason why I participate in io.js is that the development pace of
joyent/node is glacial and has been for a long time. Bugs go unfixed,
security issues often go unaddressed for far too long, pull requests
collect dust instead of reviews, releases are few and far between
(e.g. the five month gap between v0.11.13 and v0.11.14); it has simply
stagnated.

[Dave Horton]

Thank you, Ben.