Buyer Beware: A Major Change in NFS is about to happen

[John Poelstra]

Kevin Fenzi said the following on 10/02/2009 08:49 AM Pacific Time:
> On Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:35:33 -0700
> John Poelstra <poelstra at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> ...snip...
> 
>> The current FESCo might also want to consider taking more of a 
>> leadership role in monitoring the release processes, tracking the 
>> schedule, and evaluating the quality of the release under development 
>> and our ability to release on time.  As the group responsible for 
>> guiding the technical direction of our releases I think this is 
>> something they should be more involved in.  I'd be glad to help
>> gather data they might need to do this and there might be others who
>> would be willing to help too.
> 
> I would love to. Can you show me the 28 hour days so I have some extra
> hours? :) 
> 
> Seriously tho, I think many of the FESCo folks _DO_ stay involved in
> lots of things, some of them might not be as visible as people think
> they would be. Or did you mean at some higher level? 
> 

I was thinking at a higher level and no, I wasn't trying to imply that 
nobody is working hard enough of needs to do more.  As I think about 
this more it was a suggestion of trading some things out and replacing 
them with others.  I'm also not intending to tell FESCo how to do their 
job or say that they are doing it wrong :-)

This came out of the original thread about people not understanding the 
milestones, etc.  It occurred to me that we might have a gap in our 
processes and I wondered who is responsible for all the maintainers 
knowing what the process and policies are around our important milestones.

Some of this happens naturally when I have to send out my email nags 
about stale feature pages, but what if in a perfect world there were no 
stale feature pages and thus my messages never went out? :)

FWIW I am hoping to update some of our wiki pages and send out more 
email reminders during Fedora 13.  Hopefully it will be helpful and not 
be considered spam.

>> I'm suggesting more proactive leadership from FESCo and clear 
>> initiatives to take Fedora to the next level versus only being 
>> responsible for approving features, proven packagers, and policy
>> matters.
>>
>> This is also my vision for the Fedora Board.
> 
> I think move involvement wherever we can get it great, but I don't
> think we should try and force people to do X hours of work on Y. 
> 

Absolutely agree.  It becomes more a matter of how we spend the same 
amount of time we are already.  It is easy to get really focused on 
managing the stuff we are already doing vs. looking for ways to stop 
doing some things (so meetings don't run two hours) and taking a broader 
view of asking if we are going in the direction we want to with the 
distro.  Are our releases getting better?  Are we meeting the needs of 
the community we are trying to build and serve?  How will we know if we 
are or are not?

> Also, if we want to require fesco and/or the board to be more involved
> and proactive, we should note these requirements for the next election. 
> 

I'm not sure if it is a requirement so much as it is a mindset that I am 
advocating.

> A possible idea for the next cycle: 
> 
> - Wait until we have the list of approved features. 
> - Divide them up amoung fesco and have a 'point contact' for each that
>   is a fesco member. 
> - Each member is responsible for testing/tracking/talking to the
>   feature owner and getting them what they need to get things done as
>   well as knowing if something is not ready/etc. 
> 
> I don't know how feasible this is given the large list of features
> however. 
> 

Sounds great to me, but would other members go for it? :)  Maybe this is 
along the lines of the "Features SIG" that someone suggested a ways back.

John