F8 desktop features

[Rahul Sundaram]

Christopher Aillon wrote:

> 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.

I am not sure who anybody needs to plead to. FESCo approval is a simple 
check so that people don't end up putting things non-free software 
helpers in the roadmap or anything else like that. If we are tracking 
some features, they would need status reports. The need for that should 
be obvious.

> 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.

Desktop doesn't have a SIG, a list of members, lead, regular irc 
meetings or a contact point documented unlike the other examples pointed 
out here but if they do the specs could easily have desktop SIG as the 
contact point instead of a specific person. That is in fact already the 
case for example, the spec for the KDE 4 plan where KDE SIG is the 
owner.  Point man is Rex Dieter.

> * 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.

Formal capacity vs informal chat seems to a matter of sending mails vs 
asking on IRC.  IRC has several problems as a means of tracking 
features.  Spec owners are distributed all over the world. Many of them 
don't do IRC.  Finding which server or channels they hang out in can be 
difficult. You have to be in the same time zone etc. Sounds tedious to me.

Rahul