[Rebuild] Communication to data consumers wrt the licence change (draft)

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 03/23/2012 04:17 PM, Dermot McNally wrote:
> So the "we" in Simon's words is either me and Matt or just Matt, in
> as much as defer to his judgement on matters relating to his code and
> how best to deploy it.

Right. And as far as I understood, Matt has never ever said that he 
prefers the offline process. Instead, he has said that in the absence of 
anything "having to be completed" on 1st April, he would actually prefer 
the online process, but that this is surely not going to be complete on 
1st April.

So either I have completely misread what Matt has said, or else other 
people are, in their heads, combining the "oh god we must have something 
to show on 1st April" panic that emanates from OSMF board with Matt's 
factual "offline process is better but not going to be completed on 1st 
April", and arriving at: "Matt (a technician to whose judgement we can 
defer) says that offline is better."

Which would be a really grand mis-interpretation of what he says.

And the reason I am so upset about this is the untruthfulness.

I want the board to stand up and say: "Yes, we have heard Matt who has 
said that the online process is better but cannot be completed by April 
1st. We have also heard that even the offline process is not guaranteed 
to be completed by April 1st. We chose to *ignore* the sentiment of the 
technician because we think that the offline process is actually better 
for the project."

What is happening here is that Matt, a technician with no history of 
political grand-standing, is being mis-quoted because of those who want 
results by April 1st no matter what the cost, nobody actually has the 
spine to say it.

> Rather Matt reached the conclusion that to have a sufficiently
> performant rebuild process, the offline approach, which is by
> definition faster than the live one, would be a better bet.

Again, this is only true if you insert *someone else*'s definition of 
"sufficiently performant". Matt never said (and of course he can correct 
me if I misrepresent him) that, say, completing in Mid-April is not 
"sufficiently performant".

> That we are now discussing it is good. I'd prefer that we not do so
> under a cloud of conspiracy theories and threats of retribution.

Remember when only recently Steve and Mikel signed an anti-Google blog 
post with their osmfoundation.org email addresses and there were 
different opinions from different board members as to whether this had 
been a board decision or not. *This* is the environment in which we are 
operating. I want full accountability, not "Oh, I thought that Matt had 
recommended this option. Now you say he didn't? I'm confused. Surely I 
would never have given the orders to shut down the database for a week...".

But let me get back to the most prominent reason why I am skeptical of 
the "hard" cutover.

The "soft" cutover is one where the API functions normally for how ever 
long it takes to make the changes. My estimate is that this might be two 
weeks. If it is done after one week, or if it should take three weeks or 
god forbid even four, the project will not be hurt apart from the fact 
that the license change is delayed (which, considering that we're so 
late in giving proper notice, would perhaps not even be a bad thing).

This means that even if something should go wrong, we'll be in a 
situation where technicians can still get the sleep that is required to 
keep their health up, where they can still do their day job, and all.

On the other hand, the "hard" cutover means that most - or even all - 
activity in the project comes to a halt while the change is going on. I 
agree with you that this is not a problem if it can be done in a day or 
two. However, it is entirely possible, and indeed likely, that it will 
take longer. That after the end of one day, a mistake is spotted that 
requires that we have to re-start. That something breaks, a transaction 
aborts, whatever. Remember this is the very first time this code is 
used. Shit *will* happen. And when it happens, the eyes of all of OSM 
are upon the - as you correctly say - too few people handling this. 
People who have a day job, a real life, maybe even a family. The whole 
project is halted, and a handful of people (likely less) will have to 
work day and night to get things going again. Or, to decide to continue 
with a half-working solution because there's no time to fix the bug 
properly. And so on.

I can see that somebody who wants to get the license change done by 1st 
April at all costs would prefer the second option. Not because it 
promises to be faster, but because it makes sure that the community 
squeezes every last drop of energy out of the few who have to do the job.

But I don't think it is good. It's not good style to treat your own 
people like that, to wantonly create such a high-stress situation. It is 
not good leadership, it is not good management, it is just reckless, and 
all for this stupid "April 1st" fetish. I don't like the spirit behind 
this, I don't like the attitude, I don't like an OSM Foundation that 
sets its priorities in this way.

You may be wishing Matt a happy birthday but at the same time you're 
pushing forward a plan that makes him and possibly a very small number 
of others the single point of failure of the whole project for days, 
when this could easily be avoided.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"