Review queue/FESCo after the merge

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 16.11.2007 16:03, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-11-16 at 13:17 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> 
>> But that just change my comment much -- I still think if someone is
>> interested in fixing/improving something in Fedora-land it should be
>> much easier than it is now. Then people would again do something on
>> their own instead of relying and waiting for committees to do that work.
> My intent 

Reminder: Please note that I'm talking about Fedora in general -- I (and
it seems others as well) got the impression that people lost interest in
participating in FESCo or FPC and the example I gave was just a example
that coincidentally was in the FPC space.

> in shaping the Packaging Guidelines the way that they are is
> not to make life difficult for contributors, but rather, to ensure
> consistency.

I know your intentions are good and the packaging guidelines improved a
lot thanks to your and the FPCs work. Thanks for that Spot.

But nevertheless: I think it's to hard for contributers that want to see
something changed in the packaging guidelines to (help) realizing those
changes. Contributing to FESCo, FPC or other Committees needs to get
easier again, then I'm optimistic that people will contribute more
again, like they did a year ago.

> Often, the FPC members disagree on the correct guidelines to implement.
> If we were to open the Guidelines and make them editable to all, we
> would see wiki wars on contentious issues, people adding their own rules
> and corner cases, and possibly contradicting guidelines.

I suspect people that started and work on wikipedia heard and hear
similar stuff each day -- nevertheless wikipedia works.

IOW: yes, now and then there will be wiki wars. We have to live with
that and exactly for such issues we need committees for that work out a
compromise.

But the ACLs also prevent lots of improvements, and that's why I think
they are bad.

Example: take a look at the old Fedora Package Maintainers Policies
policies at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Policy
They are not secured by ACLs and it works fine. Nobody touched them
normally -- and if he is being careful. Like for example AlexLancaster,
who in the past days did some small improvements to some of the pages;
for example:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Policy/WhoIsAllowedToModifyWhichPackages?action=info

> The FPC has a documented process (which is almost never followed) on how
> to make a change to anything under Packaging/ (or to propose new
> Guidelines):

Yeah, but I got the impression that something like this it's a to high
hurdle already.

> [...] 
> Thorsten, this is certainly not intended as a criticism for you, as I
> continue to have great admiration for the work that you do in the Fedora
> community, but rather, a call to action for specific improvements that
> we can make to streamline the bureaucracy. :)

I have no solutions, just some ideas; I gave some of them already, but
the main one is likely the motto EPEL has these days: "Power to the
people with no delay." aka "make Steering Committees (and beeing in
them) a lot less unimportant".

Something similar would IMHO be nice for other areas of Fedora as well.
Which would mean remove the hurdles (like ACLs in the Packging/ area)
and let people simply do stuff -- in the open of course, so everyone
knows what happens. Only if some task or decision is controversial and
no agreement can be found on the list or on IRC activate a flexible
committee that has to make sure a agreement is found. Flexible like:
don't let a elected group decide that might not have that much of an
interest in a topic; instead let those decide that drove the thing that
discssed, those that participated in discussing it *and* 5 - 13 people
that were most active in this work area in the past months.

Cu
knurd