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Re: Checking In with etcd folks! (was Re: [k8s-steering] Worrying state of Etcd community)

Paris Pittman
 

I think that it's more than worthwhile to have a senior+ community engineer onboard to the etcd maintainer crew and frankly, think all graduated projects should have this kind of support for someone part time (50%) or full time. (see: /issues/43). Are there any orgs that could step up and provide this support now? Would the etcd maintainer folks welcome this? 

The communities are too large and the maintainer burden is too high to do the necessary work to build and then maintain the community. Things that a senior+ community engineer could help the etcd crew with:
- video tutorials for reviewing code/advanced contributing/maintainer training 
- run your community meetings 
- ama sessions for new contributors and those interested in maintaining
- outreach for new maintainers/future maintainers 
- help with continuity and institutional knowledge gathering for onboarding and offboarding maintainers 
- detailed contributing and developer guides 

On Mon, Jul 18, 2022 at 1:49 PM Marek Siarkowicz <siarkowicz@...> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 18, 2022 at 7:52 PM Davanum Srinivas <davanum@...> wrote:
Marek, Sahdev, 
It has been a few months since this email about lack of enough hands to help with etcd. Has the situation improved at all? 


Benjamin Wang from VMware became a new maintainer, however our capacity didn't grow much as Piotr Tabor is on long holidays (till October). Not sure if he still plans to continue to be active after as he no longer works on etcd at Google.

There was some progress on issues mentioned in the original email, however the underlying issues were not addressed:
* We patched the etcd governance, it now officially supports lazy consensus after 2 weeks. However, we are still struggling with restoring unwritten knowledge that was lost with previous maintainers. For example, interaction with CNCF. We just discovered that the only remaining active etcd maintainers were unaware and did't have access to CNCF helpdesk. https://github.com/cncf/foundation/pull/387 <- still waiting
* In the last couple of months we discovered and fixed a data inconsistency issue that was hiding within untriaged issues (postmortem). However, it took us over a year to fix, the number of new untriaged issues doesn't go down (#14138), we get new reports about critical issues (#14211, #14143, #14098) and we are still unable to qualify the latest release. In my opinion there is still a significant risk of undiscovered issues present in v3.5 release.
* With Benjamin joining we just managed to fill all the release manager positions (#13912). We have enough capacity to review and merge bug fixes. However, we still don't review non-bugfix. As this creates bad experience for new contributors that are unaware of this policy, I'm planning to make it official that etcd doesn't accept new features until we are happy with reliability and qualification.

cc +paris.pittman@... 
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