Fedora Board Recap 2009-07-16 UTC 1600

[Dimitris Glezos]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 7:27 PM, Jesse Keating<jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-07-19 at 23:07 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Extended_Life_Cycle#Interested_People
>>
>> I did not because it benefits me in any way but because I really do want
>> to understand what the work actually is over a period of time and see
>> for myself if the cost is worth the benefit. I suggest that the board
>> approve the infrastructure request and let the community succeed or fail
>> on its own goals rather than refuse to provide infrastructure and
>> therefore adding a very substantial barrier to entry for interested
>> contributors. The rise in interest in EPEL after the move to Koji and
>> Bodhi suggests that even a different infrastructure is a major barrier
>> even for seasoned contributors. If it was just pushing more updates in a
>> existing branch and if users can continue getting updates for a longer
>> time without doing anything at all, this proposal has a better chance of
>> succeeding.
>
> While in Berlin, I got a work estimate from the RH Security team on what
> it would take to watch over all of Fedora and fix any critical security
> issues.  They estimated one full time person.  I've relayed that
> information to Jeroen, and he has stated that there will be at least one
> person committed to working on this task.  The interesting thing here is
> that unlike other proposals it doesn't necessarily rely upon existing
> contributors to do something different or extra, nor is it a half hazard
> approach of "whatever people feel like pushing", nor is it an open ended
> immeasurable task, Jeroen is willing to setup metrics and a timeline to
> be measured by those metrics to judge success/fail of the effort.
>
> For those reasons, I think it would be worth approving the effort and
> getting real data on just how many people step up to participate, as
> well as consume the output and if success/failure can be met.

I think it's worth trying it out. The success is judged like any other
Fedora project: by the success of the team behind the adventure
itself.

Given the fact that Jeroen has already stepped up in bootstrapping a
team and is willing to provide the necessary metrics to show the
progress of the team itself, thus reducing the probability of planning
for something big only to see it fail miserably in the end, I think we
should support the effort.

I'll enjoy the fruits too, TBH; at my company we have a couple of
legacy desktops which I'd like to delay their update for a few months
more.

On a more abstract note: Indeed, it might not fit 100% into our
First/Features objectives. However, I'd like to see Fedora try new
things out. If we keep too focused on our self description, which is
created from the existing things we do, we make it harder for change
to happen. For me, Fedora isn't so much what we think it is -- it's
what our community wants it to be. And if a part of our community
wants to try new things out, given that the resources needed won't be
unmanageable, we should encourage them to do so.

-d


-- 
Dimitris Glezos

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