2015-09-14 23:10 GMT+02:00 Brendan Conoboy <blc@redhat.com>:

AFAICS somehow the goals and means have gotten confused, and we are
trying to find goals that would make sense in a specific
implementation method; that’s completely backwards.

<snip>

Let’s think about the/produced artifacts/, whatever that is, first:
decide what we want to achieve by the policies, and what the desired
and practical policies would be. /Then/ would be an appropriate time
to check for subset/superset relationships and other ways to
inherit/share effort; /not/ at the very start of the definition process!

You are right that we do need to think about overall goals to be achieved, then the policies that achieve those goals.

<snip>

During today's base wg we talked a little bit further about possible goals that a ring 0 might fulfill

(http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-2/2015-09-14/fedora_base_design_working_group.2015-09-14-14.15.log.html). A few hypothetical possibilities as examples:

1. Make a "Base" (or ring0) compose who has its own alpha/beta/ga cycle that precedes the RC deadlines for the current editions and spins, providing a stable set of NVRs to base upon.

2. New boundaries for primary/secondary arch blocker status, rules for excludearch, threshold for inclusion in primary koji, etc.
3. Decouple the ring 0 release cycle and support terms from the editions.

To me none of the above look like goals, they are implementation mechanisms for $something. None of them are “you should use Fedora because…". Only #3 would qualify for even being mentioned in release notes.

¹ (I am /not/ seriously proposing these or willing to debate these;
just as an example of what we /might/ want.)

[great examples of things to dicuss]

Are you saying we might want to consider these but you personally don't want to own the discussion? Not clear on why you've put them out there but advised against debate.

Most importantly I wanted to point out the goals vs. implementation ordering and priority.

The things I have quoted seem interesting and useful as goals to me (which is why I care that the rings paradigm is not suitable for them), but I currently have time neither to argue for them nor, more importantly, to actually help them get done, so they should be discounted as “some nobody’s idea we can’t care about”.

OTOH stopping the “our goal is to define Ring 0 and we can do anything at all as long as it will be a Ring 0” thought train, or confirming that we really want to be on this train, is something I thought I could do with the time I have.

Mirek