no strawman update before Tuesday

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Wed, 04 Aug 2004 07:00:26 -0400, Michael Tiemann <tiemann at redhat.com> wrote:
> Therefore, I plan to specifically update the Governance document, and
> also try to handle the "non-free" stuff better, perhaps doing so the way
> that Debian does in their social contract.

The non-free issues are going to be a blocker for many of the possible
community initiative efforts that would want to be recognizes as a
Fedora Collection. So even if Fedora comes up with a well thought out
and easily digestable policy about non-free packages, it might
discourage people on the fringe from contributing inside the fedora
umbrella. good luck with that. The other issue from the community side
is how strictly Fedora Collections are expected to use only packages
from Core+Extras instead of Alternatives. For example, openmosix
patched kernel that fit a niche livecd collection.   I'm not sure how
much interest there is in a communtiy collections that must meet the
strictest requirements on non-free and non-alternatives.  Not that
policy in these areas must bend to popular or vocal opinion, but i
would be concerned about going through the trouble of setting up
policy around the Collections idea that was unworkable in practise
becuase the restrictions on which packages to use is too narrow to fit
the situations that community are interested in building a collection
for.

>From the development process side. I think any non-livecd collection
maintainers will have to commit to tracking the Core timescale.
Testing of the collections that are going to consume both core and
extras packages needs to sync with the changes in the devel tree. You
might even have to have a go/no-go review policy about specific
alternative collections if they fail to keep up with the development
cycle to prevent 'sending out a half-backed' collection. I fear that
if there 5 or 6 collections to keep up with, the Board will be under
continual pressure  from several collection committees to slip
development cycle timescales, especially collections that use very
niche extra packages that get kicked in the head during major
development upheaval that don't ncessarily get a lot of use. I
invision situations where the Fedora PVR collection might not pass its
review for a release synced with FC6 release and thus Fedora PVR would
just not have a release during that development cycle.  Or a more
realistic example.... any Fedora collection that would attempt to
include a version of wine.

-jef