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  • From: Seth Woolley <swoolley AT panasas.com>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Grimoire Team Lead vote
  • Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 11:01:17 -0800

Jeremy Blosser (emrys) wrote:
> In connection with this vote I move that the QA and Security Teams be
> dissolved, with their respective responsibilities falling to the
> relevant areas. ie, the Grimoire Team would be responsible for their
> own security updates and releases, same with the ISO and Sorcery
> Teams, etc. We don't have the people to keep up on all of these
> teams, and at least until we do I think it's more appropriate for each
> "product" team to handle their own security patches and releases. If
> someone agrees I'd ask them to second this motion, and then I'd ask
> the PL to judge how best to make a decision inside the timeframe of
> the Grimoire Lead vote.

Eric Sandall responded:
> > If the other TLs see no objection to this (including Seth, since
> > we'd be disolving his position ;)) then we make it so.

I agree with the motion to dissolve the teams and unify them under a single Grimoire Lead. It does make sense that Grimoire Lead should be ultimately responsible for the quality and security of the grimoire. Especially while working on the QA team as Team Lead, I've essentially been acting as development anyways, fixing problems I've identified as problematic for upgrades, stability, and usability. As QA Team Leader I would have handed more of these things off to development were it not for the fact that we really don't have any extra people to hand them off to at this stage.

As a result, I do accept the nomination for Grimoire Team Lead.

This is not to say that the Arwed has been remiss. Arwed has been a very continuous contributor, and, to be fair, the QA and Security Teams were not directly his responsibility. Though, when I lead the QA and Security Teams, I considered the Grimoire Team Lead as having veto power over anything the QA and Security Teams did, informally. Fortunately, that informal structure I imagined never had to be invoked.

We've both been with Source Mage for half a decade and so I know I would trust either of us to continue this leadership role well. Moreover, if I were to be not elected, I would look forward to the exact same things I'm working on and proposing in this email, perhaps as a General Lead (as discussed before), or not (if that doesn't go through). If Arwed is elected, he may even appoint me QA and Security Warlock or something like that ;) I consider it good news that SMGL can muster more than one well-qualified candidate for the Grimoire Team Lead. Thus voters should think in terms of who they think should be ultimately responsible, rather than who they would want to win. I realize this election may come down to a coin toss for some of us to decide which way to vote (or which ranking to select). If Arwed were not re-elected, I would support his nomination and election as a General Team Lead, as well.

Jeremy continued:
> With that in mind I nominate Seth Woolley for the position of Grimoire
> Lead and ask that any canidates include in their remarks specific
> details of how they would manage security and release updates for the
> Grimoire, whether the QA and Security Teams are kept or not.

I'll begin with general historical remarks. When I started with the project, my main angle was security. Not an expert at that time, I wanted to improve the security aspect of SMGL, and I feel that we've come a long way in making the update process for security very robust. I coralled hundreds of security issues, fixing them in the timeframe of hours and days and proposed and pushed for systematic improvements to the security update process. We now have better update logic in sorcery, specifically around patchlevels, eliminating the ambiguity of the UPDATED field in spells. For QA, I proposed and helped move for a more logical testing structure for stable grimoire releases. No doubt we have a usable stable grimoire because of these changes. I was able to work with the Sorcery Team Lead, Andrew, as well as Arwed, current Grimoire Team Lead, on both these teams to get my desires implemented. Specifically with QA, Andrew was an immense structural helper since he had been working in QA professionally and knew how High Performance Computing handled QA issues. From a Sorcery standpoint as well, I proposed the first iteration of the (now even better) GPG signing system for spell source downloads and updates, which I successfully got critical mass behind, not without some effort. David Brown, Jeremy Blosser, Andrew Stitt, and others were instrumental in improving my original design and implementation.

I'm only a recent Lead of the QA Team and there are a few critical things left to do to finish the release testing process. If I am elected, I will continue working toward this (e.g. working on prometheus). I would have been further along but for a major move into a different state and a motherboard failure on the remote computer I was doing my main development on both sapping my time. Fortunately my new job involves learning and implementing extensive QA structures, skills I think I can leverage to continue the future release testing path. I'm also nearly settled in: I expect to have everything I had setup in Portland, Oregon back up and running in Oakland, California in April (in time for Tax Day ;) ).

As far as what I would be responsible for doing "in the future", I consider myself somebody willing to do the hard things nobody generally wants to have to do. This includes security updates and release testing. I proved this with my leadership of both the Security and QA teams. If the Security and QA Teams are kept instead of dissolved I would help recruit people into these positions and educate them on how I did them in the past. If they are dissolved, I'd take up the Security Team and QA Team work until I, similarly, found people to help take the load off. Unlike the corporate world, and similarly with any truly volunteer organization, we usually expect the Leads to do the brunt of the work if volunteers fail to materialize. My election would mean in either scenario that I re-take-on the security update responsibility which seems to have fallen by the wayside as Thomas dropped out of the SMGL scene after doing some major hardening work in a separate branched grimoire.

Fortunately, security problems in core gnu/linux/unix services have been increasingly rare as the standard unix service stack, BIND, Sendmail, Apache, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, etc. have been more thoroughly audited, and security update duties are becoming more about keeping up on spell updates for structural and layered security issues. It still needs keeping up on, though, and I'm prepared to take that on again.

If I'm elected to this position of greater responsibility, I will consider Source Mage my sole hobby. I used to do, in addition to Source Mage, major political volunteering that I no longer feel I have to do in the Bay Area (phew!). I was Secretary of the Oregon Pacific Green Party and my local chapter spanning four years. That should free up at least half of my spare time. I'm also married and have no children, which means I don't have to worry about finding and securing a mate, which of course probably takes so much time for the majority of our users that I can easily see why they don't have that much time to contribute back ;).

On a philosophical level, I'm a dues-paying member of the Free Software Foundation. I'm ideologically aligned with Eben Moglen and Richard Stallman, although not as exclusivist as they are. I consider the decision whether or not to use Free Software versus proprietary software a matter of personal choice, not a universal moral maxim. Source Mage's Social Contract seems particularly well-suited to my philosophical position. Mainly, I consider the FSF's understanding of DRM issues and The Right to Read critical to the future of intellectual freedom in our world. I don't think of the philosophical opinions I have described as particularly meaningful for my election, but some may want to know before deciding. The one though I would say is that as I work on Source Mage, regardless of my election, I may promote that we move to GPLv3 or later, depending on what comes out of the draft process, to protect against DRM, patents, and other more and more relevent issues today that may prevent our right to read and tinker.

If anybody has any questions, I'll be in IRC (as swoolley) as often as possible to answer questions and kiss babies.

Seth
--
Seth Alan Woolley
Software Engineer
Accelerating Time to Results(TM) with Clustered Storage

www.panasas.com
swoolley AT panasas.com
510-608-4382




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