Cross-Language Working Group

[tedsuo]

This PR proposes the formation of a "Cross-Language Working Group" to develop and maintain day-to-day project management for the OpenTracing codebases.

Cross-Language Working Group

The Cross-Language Working Group manages the OpenTracing APIs and ecosystem. In order to handle the growing volume of contributions, this working groups is tasked with overseeing the development and maintenance of the OpenTracing language APIs and contributed instrumentation.

Any number of working group members are allowed; preferably at least two or more experts per language. Members with overlapping responsibilities divide the work amongst themselves.

Responsibilities

• Participate in Cross-Language Working Group sessions.
• Develop protocols for proposing and resolving Issues and Pull Requests.
• Triage backlogs for API and OT-contrib repositories.
• Actively participate in PR reviews.
• Work with OT-contrib maintainers to ensure instrumentations are not abandoned, have tags applied uniformly, and are well tested.
• Ensure that APIs do not drift away from each other, or the core specification.
• Inform the community with monthly activity summaries and versioning announcements.

Initial agenda for Working Group sessions

• Develop Issue/PR templates
• Brainstorm backlog triage procedure
• Initial repo assignments

Notes

• This group is not tasked with creating Pull Requests or Issues, though individual members are welcome to do this, just like any other community member. Instead, this group sets up and maintains enough project structure to ensure that changes are managed smoothly.
• The intention is to start with a single group for managing all APIs and contrib projects. If this proves unwieldy, we will subdivide into smaller working groups.

Initial Membership

If you are interested in joining this Working Group, please let @tedsuo know or reply below.

[tedsuo]

If you are interested in joining this group, please respond and list the languages/domains you would like to focus on.

[pavolloffay]

I am interested in javaland

[carlosalberto]

I'm interested in Python and C#.

[jcchavezs]

I am interested in Go and PHP.

[rnburn]

I'd like to join for C++.

Not sure how active these languages are, but would also be interested in Objective C and Swift.

[vprithvi]

I'm interested in Java!

[tiffon]

I'm interested in JavaScript.

@tedsuo Not sure what you mean by "domains" ?

[malafeev]

I am interested in Java, Scala

[daschl]

I am interested in java and rust

[CMCDragonkai]

I'd be interested in Haskell.

[MikeGoldsmith]

I'm interested in helping with C#. Possibly F# at a later date.

[jpkrohling]

I would be interested in Java and Go

[palazzem]

I would be more than happy to help with the Python repository!

[isaachier]

Interested in joining for C/C++.

[tedsuo]

Awesome, so much great interest. I'll leave this open till the end of the week, and begin contacting everyone and planning on Monday.

[gbbr]

🎊

I'd be very happy to help out with the Go library. I think it's of utmost importance for the OpenTracing libraries to respect language idioms and standards in order for them to become adopted by the community.

Please consider counting me in.

[tylerbenson]

Add me to Java also.

[delner]

I'm interested in Ruby.

[realark]

I'm interested in Java.

[dimtruck]

I'm interested in C# and Java

[cwe1ss]

I'm between jobs so I'm not sure yet how much time I'll have in my next job but I'd be happy to help with the C# / .NET efforts.

[black-adder]

I'm interested in golang

[bhs]

nit: "meet regularly" (no "at")

[bhs]

So to be clear, there is one group that manages all languages? Or one group per language?

The name of this working group is important, and after thinking about it I'm not sure "Language" is the right word, esp if it cuts across all languages. Maybe "API and Integrations Working Group"??? (To distinguish from "documentation") Or "API and Ecosystem Working Group" since that's what's being "managed" in the description below?

[wu-sheng]

@bhs @tedsuo I prefer one group per language, if we have enough supporter.

[tedsuo]

Having discussed it with many people, I suggest we start with one group, splitting out later once we understand how that will work. We can update the project organization again when that occurs.

[tedsuo]

I mentioned in another comment, but the reason we want to start with a single group is to identify and work on cross-language issues first.

[bhs]

nit: "this working group" (singular)

[bhs]

these are per-language? e.g., if I work on C#, I don't care about PHP and don't want to attend that session since I may have nothing to add.

[jcchavezs]

Not every language has the same amount of contributors nor same enthusiasm. IMO one of the goals of having a community supporting languages is to spread and share the success working groups like java had. It can be that one could have nothing to add in a language conversation but I guess there are loads of stuff to add in other matters.

[tedsuo]

I agree with @jcchavezs. Also, there actually is a great deal that we need to care about, cross language-wise, in order to provide a unified experience for OpenTracing users.

[wu-sheng]

I am interested in Java and C#. Maybe I can't provide too many actual coding works, since your guys know, I am in the middle of too many open source trace-related project. But SkyWalking intends to provide C# agent, maybe can provide feedbacks about Java and C# APIs.

Glad to share.

[xeviknal]

I am interested in joining Ruby's team. However, I don't know how much time I could put here. Let's see :)

[cwe1ss]

Given that C# is a 99% port of Java, I don't think that there should generally be separate meetings for these languages.

Sure, there will be C#/.NET specific stuff but most of this will be in opentracing-contrib regarding instrumenting popular frameworks/libraries etc. and meetings for that (should they be necessary) could always be scheduled separately.

[tedsuo]

Thanks all! Based on feedback, II've renamed this the "Cross-Language Working Group" to clarify that the focus is about creating and implementing project-wide standards.

Obviously, there are language-specific aspects of backlog maintenance that will require some amount of specialization, and language-specific subgroups which can manage those issues. But the main focus is ensuring that cross-language concerns are applied uniformly, and no particular language API is being ignored or diverging accidentally from the rest.

[jcchavezs]

+1

[bhs]

Thanks!

[pavolloffay]

Is the list of maintainer going to be published somewhere? Is there going to be GH team?

[wu-sheng]

I prefer to provide a separated maintainer lists rather than in this org file. Otherwise, this will become a big file.

[tedsuo]

@wu-sheng @pavolloffay I agree the list should be separate. The first working group agenda item should be to write down who is in the working group. :)

Joking aside, I believe that maintaining lists of who to contact and assign issues to will be an important part of what this group does. GH groups will be useful for applying these permissions.

[tedsuo]

I've merged this PR, and the working group is now created! I've invited everyone who responded in this issue to the working group gitter channel, and created a document for brainstorming an agenda. We will discuss meeting formats on gitter and schedule an initial working group session.

Gitter Channel:
https://gitter.im/opentracing/cross-language

Agenda Proposals:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1smZEGqt7rQVdg1f5m2AWpWhQDbvrcRKvrfmBomEpofg/

Cheers,
@tedsuo