Re: Feb 19 meeting actions, discussion, notes, and recording

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025, Michael Dexter wrote:
> On 2/28/25 11:16 AM, Greg Wallace wrote:
> > I'm not sure I totally follow, but I *think* you're suggesting that the
> > bhyve manageability workstream from EWG be absorbed into the production
> > users call.
>
> That is an attractive approach of many possible ones. Chris M has de facto
> played this role regardless of the exact affiliation.
>
> Chris, perhaps you can speak from the EWR perspective?
>

TLDR: yup. Let's do it.

...

Admittedly, lately I have failed to put the necessary presence and energy
into the bhyve manageability work stream, which would be required to move
this forward consistently. I agree with Greg, that this is as much about
resources (whether people or money makes no difference in my mind) as it
is about focusing activities through a forum like regular calls or a
mailing list.

Michael, in my opinion you have done more for bhyve (and jails, and ZFS,
and so much more) than I could ever hope to achieve. A brief review of all
recordings of the bhyve calls and hours of conversations about state
management and various approaches to bhyve manageability will easily prove
that your weekly calls are already the go-to-place for in-depth knowledge
about bhyve and bhyve manageability.

The EWG calls with their monthly schedule vs the weekly bhyve
calls condense that conversation around the state of things, summarizing
ongoing activities and tracking progress and thus servce a slightly
different purpose - as Greg pointed out.

The topic of "where/how to track/manage what?" is very much becoming more
important to clarify. We now have an Enterprise Working Group, weekly
bhyve calls, the Laptop and Desktop Working Group; then we've established
a OCI testing group derived from that and we're lately also looking at the
formation of a UX testing group. We'll need some kind of governance to
manage with overlaps to avoid conflict and double work or rework.

Greg recently pointed this out in one of the Enterprise Working Group
calls and we were already planning to draft some suggestions for how to
address this. It's on me that we didn't manage to meet and discuss this
yet - I'm still committed however. Maybe it makes sense to include you in
the conversation, Michael?

Proof in point: one item on the Laptop and Desktop Workgroup agenda is
improving virt-manager use with bhyve. Obviously, that connects to both
your calls. Regardless of how/where it get's done - we all benefit. We
simply should avoid working on it in parallel in multiple places.

You also independently raised the question, whether virt-manager wouldn't
be a good path forward for bhyve manageability, Michael. Clearly we all
see the writing on the wall.

I'd like to suggest we (Michael, Greg, Alice, me, anyone else?) figure out
a draft for dealing with overlaps and also how to address the "elephant in
the room" that occurs now and then: when things fizzle out and get
orphaned, we need to be brave enough to park things and stop tracking
continuous non-progress. Once we have that draft, we can publish it for
community feedback and from there.

What do you think?

And attempting to answer you starting question: I think it's fine to move
conversation about bhyve manageability into the weekly bhyve calls. The
detailed and technical conversations were already happening there -
there's no denying that. Reporting the big picture progress in the EWG (if
there is any) would still benefit the community, but we should also admit
it, if there is little progress and archive activities if they lack
resources for the moment.

Holy wall of text Batman... anyone who's made it down here: congrats!

chris