F8 desktop features

[Christopher Aillon]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 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.

As was pointed out on other lists, that doesn't stop anyone from putting 
in non-free software.  They simply have to not write a feature page on 
the wiki and just do it.  We can take recourse, but the FESCo approval 
process does not stop it if someone wants to do it.  So, one could make 
the argument that FESCo approval should be needed only if someone is 
unsure about whether it is a good idea; not for everything, which would 
be more of a "steering" role IMO.

>> 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 

Yeah.  Now if only there was a member of desktop that was on the 
board/fesco that had stated they wanted to facilitate communication 
between the desktop team and both the board and fesco as part of their 
mission statement prior to successfully being elected....


>> * 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.

Or we could make you do it since you seem to never sleep and thus are in 
everyone's timezone.  ;-)