Everything’s been super hectic with the holidays and so nobody noticed that I didn’t post the last two weeks, right? I joke, but not really. We’ve been super busy too and not just with the regular holiday stuff. In between the celebrations and glühwein, we’ve been working on community building.
As a community, we decided on the name for our new community maintained Puppet™️ fork and we decided that Vox Pupuli would adopt it. Now we’re busy creating the organization governance, porting all the repositories in, and setting up the pipelines and build tooling to streamline package publication. You’ll see a lot more information about things soon when everything’s done and we make the official announcement, but that’s a lot of work for a few weeks over the holidays when people are usually checked out!
Our biggest remaining challenge right now is determining release criteria that balances establishing our own brand presence against ecosystem safety all while respecting Perforce’s trademarks. I’m talking about agreeing on what names need to be changed before we can release packages and call them our own. I’m grateful for David, Jake, Sara, and others from Perforce who have given us loads of their own time to help us get to a resolution in everyone’s benefit.
This ability to pull together and work to find solutions, even over strong disagreements, is one of the indicators of a strong community. I’m confident that this spirit of collaboration is going to continue as we build the new Puppet™️ Language Steering Committee to guide our shared future. I’m quite excited for this steering committee because it’s got representatives from the entire community, even including Perforce itself. It’s the first time that community user needs sit at the same table as the business needs do without anyone having veto power over the other.
Being at the same table ensures that we don’t diverge too much and that we stay compatible and interoperable. These efforts, along with others like converging on acceptable compatibility names, will help ensure that the same Puppet™️ Forge works for all of us, that Vox Pupuli developer tools remain usable on Puppet Enterprise, that the PDK builds modules for whatever Puppet™️ implementation you happen to be running, and that our entire ecosystem remains collaborative and engaging regardless of where we work.
I’m kind of digging where we are. Some of it may have been born out of conflict and there were some hurt feelings all around. But being able to talk things over, share our needs, and work together to resolve them means that together we are a community and together we will build an ecosystem that’s stronger than it ever has been before.