F8 desktop features

[Christopher Aillon]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 7/27/07, Matthias Clasen <mclasen at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Being verbose not so much, more that fact that it feels like applying
>> for a Fedora Mortgage - you have been pre-approved !
> 
> I appreciate the status update to this list, but I'd have to concur
> with Jesse. We really need to find ways for the active developers to
> communicate their excitement about 'cool' things which are being
> worked on as widely as possible.


So, there are two things here.

1. The Board/FESCo needs this information.  I'll agree using those hats.

2. The current way of getting the information is causing headache.  "If 
you want to be allowed to work, you need to plead your case to the Don, 
and then every two weeks you need to pay up with status reports else 
your feature gets sent to sleep with the fishes."  Using my maintainer 
hat, I'll agree with Matthias this policy is not ideal.

The answer is to continue getting the information but to fix the means 
of doing so.  We're effectively adding hassle rather than inviting 
people and facilitating communication, which is just wrong wrong WRONG.

Possible solutions:

* Go to a "point man".  Appoint someone from e.g. the KDE Sig, Desktop 
team, Rel-Eng, etc to provide updates for all relevant features.  This 
lets the engineers do the work, and lets others contribute esp if they 
aren't necessarily engineers and facilitates intra-team communication.
* Ask for updates via IRC, casually.  Maintainers tend to be quite 
responsive when asked casually vs in a formal capacity.  It's just geek 
nature.  Fedora needs to mold around they work, not the other way 
around.  A "Feature Manager" would be suited to do this.
* Monitor checkins/IRC chat.  Slightly more agressive version of the 
previous.  Probably not feasible.
* ??? Other ideas here.