The community has lost control... (Was: Re: Don't put new packages through updates-testing)

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Sat, 2007-06-02 at 15:21 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 02.06.2007 12:28, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > On Sat, 02 Jun 2007 15:25:04 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >
> > [...]  The community has lost control over what used to be a
> > community-driven Fedora Extras. [...]
> 
> +1 to that -- if Fedora Extras one or two years ago would have wanted to
> switch something like koji or bodhi then I'd say FESCo would have looked
> at it first before Extras would have started to use it. FESCo further
> would have insisted on proper docs, clear rules (discussed by the
> community beforehand) and easy procedures.
> 
I don't agree with this portion entirely.  There are two ways in which
control has been shifted in the past year:  1) The community has
*delegated* control over some of the implementation to certain teams
(notably releng and infrastructure).  This means there is less hands on
work being done that involves all community members and more goal driven
work.  The merge, for instance, was a goal given to infrastructure to
implement tools for and releng to create the policies that would allow
"Core" to make a Fedora 7 Release.  2) The community is in the process
of integrating the Core Packager Community and the Extras Packager
Community.  This means that the power of both entities will become less
concentrated as concerns from each need to be addressed.

> So lets deal with it [the merge] now -- for example by making "contributing to
> Fedora easy again, get the community involved better into the decisions
> process and make packagers happy again" one of the most important
> "Features" for Fedora 8. Otherwise the merge might fail in the end.

+1.  I think one of the goals that FESCo and the community need to hand
to infrastructure and releng for the F8 cycle is "Make things easier to
use".  This thread is proof that this will require some debate.  I think
what would help all sides see the way forward is to enunciate the issues
and goals as they see them before stepping into the realm of solutions.
We need to lay out what the problems the current procedures address are
and what the procedures leave to be desired.  Then we can provide
solutions that have different tradeoffs to see how they work or, when
all the planets align, solutions that address all the concerns :-)

Another goal that I think we need is to work on integrating the Core and
Extras Communities.  When Fedora started, there was a commitment from
within Red Hat that decision making would happen on public forums with
community input.  Despite the problems outlined above, I think the past
year has seen this commitment become much more solid than before (Board
Meetings in IRC, discussions by the internal teams on the mailing lists,
the merge allowing people from the Extras Community to make spins,
Extras Community members on the releng team, etc.)  However, we need to
take the next step.  We've consolidated our decision making under one
hierarchy but we need to combine our communities as well.  It shouldn't
matter that we have some people working at Red Hat, some for Dell, some
for themselves, some for universities.... We need to find ways to start
thinking of ourselves as one community.  And we need to start
communicating with each other as members of a single team.

-Toshio
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