Board efforts: scope, concept, and permission?

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 05:16:14PM -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 01:11:47PM -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Tue, 2010-02-02 at 14:36 -0600, Adam Miller wrote:
>> > On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
>> > <snip>
>> > > Take a random downstream app. (Firefox is an example, but there are many
>> > > others.) Right now, it only needs to track a single version of python,
>> > > or a single auth framework, even if it may be used on any desktop or any
>> > > spin. The implication is that in some sort of future with SIG-specific
>> > > conflicting frameworks, this downstream app maintainer now must be familiar
>> > > with, and handle *all* of the frameworks, even though they're not
>> > > specifcally a part of any SIG. That's sort of a rotten thing to do to
>> > > Joe Random Maintainer.
>> > >
>> > > You could say that the SIG needs to then supply people to handle every
>> > > potential downstream app, but that's also not nice, and is going to lead
>> > > to fun coordination with updates.
>> > <snip>
>> > 
>> > I don't think that's an issue either, I'm not proposing we change
>> > anything such that it could cause problems. I'm saying the way things
>> > are now works and I don't understand the desire to change it.
>> 
>> The way things are now "works" because of status quo.  We tell anybody
>> who wants to change status quo to go start a fork and do it there.
>>
>Wait... The entire list of times I can remember someone being encouraged to
>take their contributions elsewhere are:
>
>1) Kernel modules
>2) Non-free software
>3) Free software with legal issues
>4) I think something to do with packaging content may have resulted in
>   something but I don't know anything about the outcome there.
>
>Who's been told to fork Fedora because of the status-quo-target-audience?

Not in so many words, but the whole Zope/Plone fiasco from a few releases
ago seems a prime example here.  Fedora moved on with python, and we didn't
allow a compat-python package for Zope and Plone to continue working.  The
reasons were varied, but they boiled down to python being a framework and
having two frameworks providing almost identical things was not deemed to
be something Fedora was going to do [1].

Those are the kinds of headaches Bill is talking about.

josh

[1] I realize Fedora is now doing python 2.6 and python3 side-by-side.  I
guess we'll find out how manageable that really is now ;)