EPEL Leadership (Was: Re: June stable push ?)

[Jeff Sheltren]

On Jun 12, 2009, at 5:00 AM, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>
>
> But the latter not the case anymore. Sure, packagers are still doing a
> whole lot of good work, but leadership/steering is afaics nearly not
> existent at all, which IMHO is a dangerous situation for a project  
> like
> EPEL (especially as RHEL6 is not that far away anymore and we need  
> to be
> prepared for that).
>
> Some examples: No weekly reports for months (which were a requirement
> from FESCo when the EPEL Steering Committee was formed and thus should
> still be written!), nearly no meetings and the steering committee
> obviously doesn't even care if testing -> stable move get done. Hey,  
> not
> even one of the steering committee members actually answered your mail
> in the past few days which IMHO tells us everything already.

Agreed, the leadership has gone stagnant lately.  Partly due to  
conflicting schedules, and I think partly due to lack of interest:   
"things are working good enough".  There have been various grumblings  
of things to do, but not too much has come from it.  I think that EPEL  
is a side project for most, if not all, of the steering committee, and  
without at least one dedicated leader, we've all gotten distracted by  
other things.

>
>
> IMHO it's time for the steering committee to say "Sorry, we screwed  
> up,
> we all step down; the last thing we do it to make sure a new steering
> committee is formed somehow"

I would be glad to step down if I thought it were the best thing to  
do, but I don't think that it is.  We have trouble even getting more  
than one or two non-steering committee members to the meetings (when  
we do have them!).  What makes you think that we could find enough  
interested/motivated people to replace the entire committee?  I'm  
under the impression that EPEL is popular with end users but there  
aren't many in the user pool who are willing or able to step up and  
help make EPEL better.

>
> (¹) Yes, I did prepare a few stable pushes over the past few months to
> help out, but I mentioned a few times already that I didn't really  
> want
> to do them anymore; looking back at it I should have made it more  
> clear
> to prevent the current situation; sorry for that;

I don't think any of this is your fault...

-Jeff