FESCO
Toshio Kuratomi
a.badger at gmail.com
Sat Apr 26 17:43:49 UTC 2008
Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> I think it just happened without purpose; in fact I suppose
> it's likely that a lot of things might be similar if I would still be in
> FESCo(²), because FESCo has a whole lot more to do these days. Maybe to
> much, especially if you want to keep up with FESCo work as spare-time
> contributer.
>
<nod>. You touched on this with your note about the Feature Process as
well. One possibility is that FESCo should be delegating smooth running
processes more. In the features case, the Feature Policy is working
pretty well for making features better but there's no reason to couple
it so tightly to FESCo. There's a procedure for getting a new feature
into Fedora now so FESCo could delegate the review of Features to a
subgroup.
However, see below for a larger, more general discussion.
[snip]
> And that is in fact the biggest problem *I* have with FESCo these days.
> FESCo afaics is mostly event driven these days (triggered by releases or
> people that poke FESCO to approve or do something); the contact
> to/interest in the contributers (and their option) was lost/got a lot worse.
>
> In the Extras days it IMHO was different -- FESCo then of course had to
> do some things that were triggered by events as well, but a lot of time
> was spend in a "how to improve Extras to make it better for users and
> contributers to keep both groups happy (and make them even
> happier!)"-mode. For that we were in closer contact with the
> contributers (their number of course was smaller and thus it was also
> easier).
>
I can't honestly say whether this was better in the Extras days (looking
back on things is always subject to idealization) but it's definitely a
worthwhile goal for the future. So part of the question would be how do
we reach that goal? I know that many of the FESCo members are on IRC
reading conversations of contributors all day everyday. Likewise with
fedora-devel. So problems that get mentioned there would nearly always
be seen. Is there a failure to push from IRC chatter to official FESCo
business? (I recall jwb, tibbs, and nirik, all bringing problems
noticed through other channels to FESCo so I personally don't think this
is the case.) Is the problem getting issues to percolate from reports
in bugzilla out to a more public venue? (Perhaps this is something bug
triage would like to take on? Noticing a problem in
Guidelines/unresponsive maintainers/etc and querying whether the issue
should be mentioned on the mailinglist?)
Although that is all still event driven. Perhaps the need is for more
ideas to be started in FESCo? Policies, features, new projects started
by FESCo to make growth occur? The only issue with that is that FESCo
has limited manpower. FESCo itself can't implement all the projects it
could come up with. Being event driven means that someone cares enough
about the issue to work on it outside of FESCo. But it does change the
role of FESCo from "movers and shakers" to "arbitrators and judges".
So here's a question -- should FESCo embrace the arbitrators and judges
role and we, the project, need to start implementing new outlets for
people who want to actually do things? (ie: Feature Process allows
developers to get buyin for implementing global distro changes and
provides a mechanism for developer work to be communicated to other
people in the project who are affected by those changes.)
or
should FESCo concentrate on being the drivers of new changes? Which
means, being more involved with creating new policies, new subprojects,
etc. This, in turn, means that FESCo would be a much more active body,
with less time for arbitration and judgement of current projects. So it
should be delegating those responsibilities out while it works on
building new communities around new subprojects.
-Toshio
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