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Typelevel governance
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Talk about whether to (partially) unify the namespace #51

Open jducoeur opened 2 years ago

jducoeur commented 2 years ago

In a recent Discord conversation, the point came up that we look fragmented in part because our projects are under many different namespaces.

This is a placeholder ticket to hold the conversation: do we care, and if so, how much? Unifying projects under, eg, a common typelevel namespace would make it a little more obvious that these projects are "official" -- that's nice, but is it worth the disruption? Also, given that many of the projects live under their own "brand" (eg, Davenverse), we aren't likely to want to try to shoehorn everything into a common namespace; is it worth doing so for some of them?

My current gut instinct is to not do this -- I'd prefer to just publicly own that TL is a community and ecosystem of cooperative systems that work together, and not try to claim that there is some sort of master plan or grand ruling body here. But we should talk about it, and consciously decide one way or another.

rossabaker commented 2 years ago

I like the two levels we have now. I trust that someone is going to step up and maintain a project under the Typelevel org. I also expect that an affiliate project under a personal brand is probably going to be of decent quality and interoperability, but also carries a much greater risk of abandonment. My inner open source hippie likes the affiliates and my inner staff engineer strongly prefers the Typelevel brand. I think there's room for both, so long as we're honest about what both are.

Projects like http4s sit in a weird place: they've proven durable over the years, independent of one person, but don't carry the full Typelevel brand. I wouldn't be strictly opposed to folding http4s into the organization, but we're already struggling with CI quotas, so there's a strong technical reason not to.

The easiest thing to sell to the CTO would be if http4s and skunk were not only in the org, but called cats-http and cats-postgresql and had those Maven coordinates and those top-level packages. But that would be a jarring change. I'm not in favor.

djspiewak commented 2 years ago

I'm in favor of status quo plus better marketing for all the reasons Ross stated. I'm also not totally convinced it's a hard sell at the C level. If anything, it demonstrates a bigger tent, which correlates well with better resiliency long term.

zmccoy commented 2 years ago

I think taking a stab at better explanations and marketing to see where it gets us is a sound idea. I've personally not had any issues with selling Typelevel as an ecosystem under "works with" circumstances for each library.