SIGs and Ownership - Next Steps (2)

[Fabian Deutsch]

Folks,

An update on the SIGs and Ownerships discussion [1]

Right now there were 3 phases proposed:
1. Assign existing approvers to SIGs
2. Set SIG ownership on specific paths
3. Follow up with defining the missions and responsibilities of the SIGs

This is an update about 1+2.

There have been discussions with a couple of "root approvers" (approvers listed in the top-level OWNERS_ALIASES file of kubevrit/kubevirt [2]) in order to come up with meaningful SIGs and "claim" their ownership.

We have looked at what areas are covered by which approver today, and started to provide PRs [3] to

a) to map more paths to owners

b) add existing approvers to the list of SIG specific approvers

Every existing approver is encouraged to help with this effort and map code to SIGs.

In the next step (3) we want to formalize the responsibilities of the SIGs more.

Why?

We as a project need to ensure that every code that is landing in the project will be taken care of. We can not assume that contributions by external people will continue to be maintained by them. Thus it is our responsibility to ensure that we - the existing approvers - have the capability to maintain the code that is flowing into the project.

Maintenance includes feature development, but also - and this is becoming much more important now that we are so mature - maintaining the code, fixing bugs, making it efficient, making and keeping it secure, making sure that GH issues are being addressed in a timely manner, allowing new members to become experts in a domain - and more.

And all of this in a scalable way. Scalability by not asking 1 approver to review 1k issues, but ask 5 SIGs to review 200 issues each.

Divide and conquer to make sure that we can continue to provide a solid project to our adopters and live up to their expectations.

Greetings, with my maintainer hat on

- fabian

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/kubevirt-dev/c/-5TLpOcRkco/m/oBuhwJjpCwAJ

[2] https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/blob/main/OWNERS_ALIASES

[3] https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/pulls?q=is%3Apr+path%3A**%2FOWNERS+created%3A%3E2024-01-01 (This should work, but is broken)

[Lee Yarwood]

On Mon, 26 Feb 2024 at 10:18, Fabian Deutsch <fdeu...@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Folks,
>
> An update on the SIGs and Ownerships discussion [1]
>
> Right now there were 3 phases proposed:
> 1. Assign existing approvers to SIGs
> 2. Set SIG ownership on specific paths
> 3. Follow up with defining the missions and responsibilities of the SIGs
>
> This is an update about 1+2.
>
> There have been discussions with a couple of "root approvers" (approvers listed in the top-level OWNERS_ALIASES file of kubevrit/kubevirt [2]) in order to come up with meaningful SIGs and "claim" their ownership.
>
> We have looked at what areas are covered by which approver today, and started to provide PRs [3] to
> a) to map more paths to owners
> b) add existing approvers to the list of SIG specific approvers
>
> Every existing approver is encouraged to help with this effort and map code to SIGs.
>
> In the next step (3) we want to formalize the responsibilities of the SIGs more.

Now that I'm finally back online did you want to continue with the k8s
inspired approach of https://github.com/kubevirt/community/pull/236
that includes spaces for SIGs to document their responsibilities?

Happy to close the PR out if not and focus on something leaner.

Cheers,

Lee

[Fabian Deutsch]

Don#t get me wrong, but yes, I think what I have learned in the past 7months: We need to be leaner.

We have few folks, and we have enough to do, thus we can not add too much.

Thus the current approach is focusing on the essentials:

1. make current sig's relevant by adding approvers / leads.

2. Assign code to sigs

3. define their missions

WRT #3 - Can you point to the specific document in your tree which could provide the structure for such a mission document for SIGs?

- fabian

 

Cheers,

Lee

[Lee Yarwood]

On Mon, 26 Feb 2024 at 13:37, Fabian Deutsch <fdeu...@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 26, 2024 at 2:32 PM Lee Yarwood <lyar...@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 26 Feb 2024 at 10:18, Fabian Deutsch <fdeu...@redhat.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Folks,
>> >
>> > An update on the SIGs and Ownerships discussion [1]
>> >
>> > Right now there were 3 phases proposed:
>> > 1. Assign existing approvers to SIGs
>> > 2. Set SIG ownership on specific paths
>> > 3. Follow up with defining the missions and responsibilities of the SIGs
>> >
>> > This is an update about 1+2.
>> >
>> > There have been discussions with a couple of "root approvers" (approvers listed in the top-level OWNERS_ALIASES file of kubevrit/kubevirt [2]) in order to come up with meaningful SIGs and "claim" their ownership.
>> >
>> > We have looked at what areas are covered by which approver today, and started to provide PRs [3] to
>> > a) to map more paths to owners
>> > b) add existing approvers to the list of SIG specific approvers
>> >
>> > Every existing approver is encouraged to help with this effort and map code to SIGs.
>> >
>> > In the next step (3) we want to formalize the responsibilities of the SIGs more.
>>
>> Now that I'm finally back online did you want to continue with the k8s
>> inspired approach of https://github.com/kubevirt/community/pull/236
>> that includes spaces for SIGs to document their responsibilities?
>>
>> Happy to close the PR out if not and focus on something leaner.
>
> Don#t get me wrong, but yes, I think what I have learned in the past 7months: We need to be leaner.
> We have few folks, and we have enough to do, thus we can not add too much.

ACK makes sense, I'll close it out now thanks.

> Thus the current approach is focusing on the essentials:
> 1. make current sig's relevant by adding approvers / leads.
> 2. Assign code to sigs
> 3. define their missions
>
> WRT #3 - Can you point to the specific document in your tree which could provide the structure for such a mission document for SIGs?

IIRC we wanted to copy the charter approach from k8s, that's
documented in the following files on the PR:

https://github.com/kubevirt/community/blob/2bee0a7984d640fee486d721207d4518a5bda25b/sig-charter-template.md
https://github.com/kubevirt/community/blob/2bee0a7984d640fee486d721207d4518a5bda25b/sig-charter-guide.md

Cheers,

Lee