EPEL Leadership (Was: Re: June stable push ?)

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 7:47 AM, Jeff Sheltren<jeff at osuosl.org> wrote:
> On Jun 12, 2009, at 5:00 AM, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>>
>>
>> But the latter not the case anymore. Sure, packagers are still doing a
>> whole lot of good work, but leadership/steering is afaics nearly not
>> existent at all, which IMHO is a dangerous situation for a project like
>> EPEL (especially as RHEL6 is not that far away anymore and we need to be
>> prepared for that).
>>
>> Some examples: No weekly reports for months (which were a requirement
>> from FESCo when the EPEL Steering Committee was formed and thus should
>> still be written!), nearly no meetings and the steering committee
>> obviously doesn't even care if testing -> stable move get done. Hey, not
>> even one of the steering committee members actually answered your mail
>> in the past few days which IMHO tells us everything already.
>
> Agreed, the leadership has gone stagnant lately.  Partly due to conflicting
> schedules, and I think partly due to lack of interest:  "things are working
> good enough".  There have been various grumblings of things to do, but not
> too much has come from it.  I think that EPEL is a side project for most, if
> not all, of the steering committee, and without at least one dedicated
> leader, we've all gotten distracted by other things.

I agree on this. I think that it requires someone who can and will
dedicate the time for a certain amount of time.

>>
>>
>> IMHO it's time for the steering committee to say "Sorry, we screwed up,
>> we all step down; the last thing we do it to make sure a new steering
>> committee is formed somehow"
>
> I would be glad to step down if I thought it were the best thing to do, but
> I don't think that it is.  We have trouble even getting more than one or two
> non-steering committee members to the meetings (when we do have them!).
>  What makes you think that we could find enough interested/motivated people
> to replace the entire committee?  I'm under the impression that EPEL is
> popular with end users but there aren't many in the user pool who are
> willing or able to step up and help make EPEL better.

I also have to agree on that. If we all step down... who is left? The
steering committee has been made mostly of the people who had
expressed interest in this over the years.

>> (¹) Yes, I did prepare a few stable pushes over the past few months to
>> help out, but I mentioned a few times already that I didn't really want
>> to do them anymore; looking back at it I should have made it more clear
>> to prevent the current situation; sorry for that;
>
> I don't think any of this is your fault...
>
> -Jeff
>
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- BSD/GNU/Linux
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"