On 24 November 2015 at 19:32, Jan Kurik <jkurik(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
> Hi Env & Stacks Working Group,
>
> during the Nomination period of the Nov/Dec 2015 Fedora Elections,
> this working group has not got enough nominees to cover all the open
> seats. We have currently 4 open seats but only 2 nominees [1].
> I would like to agree on a plan, how to deal with this situation.
>
> From my point of view there might be two solutions:
> 1) On an internal mailing list in RedHat I have seen some comments
> about handover of responsibilities from Env&Stacks WG to other teams
> (like Atomic, Cloud, etc.). If this is the case, the WG might revisit
> its purpose and adapt the resources to it, so the Elections will not
> be needed.
That internal post was from me, and I think the idea of downgrading
Environments & Stacks from a governance body to a discussion group is
one we should seriously consider.
As part of explaining why I've started to think that, I'd like to
point out some relevant historical timelines:
* October 2013: Matthew Miller presented the "Fedora Rings" concept at
the inaugural Flock conference
* January 2014: CentOS becomes a Red Hat sponsored community project
* April 2014: Project Atomic was launched
* August 2014: OpenShift Origin v3 rearchitecture was announced
The reason I think that timeline is relevant is that at the time the
Environments & Stacks Working Group was first conceived:
1. CentOS was not yet sponsored directly by Red hat
2. Project Atomic didn't exist as a community
3. OpenShift Origin had yet to rebase their architecture on Docker & Kubernetes
What this means is that initiatives that may otherwise have been
Fedora Environments & Stacks projects have instead found homes in
other communities - the governing body for
softwarecollections.org is
a CentOS SIG, the Docker integration work in Fedora is largely being
driven through the Cloud WG and Fedora Release Engineering by way of
initiatives like "Two Week Atomic", and the various pieces of the
Atomic Developer Bundle can be consumed directly from Project Atomic
by the Workstation WG, without needing additional input from
Environments & Stacks.
Containerising components of the operating system itself is a question
to be addressed by the Base WG, while authority over the package
review process rests with the Packaging Committee.
Individual pieces like the Developer Portal, DevAssistant, and COPR
are handled by the people working on them, without needing additional
oversight from Envs & Stacks.
The Software Component Pipeline idea is something I've been looking at
more recently, but like Software Collections before it, I'm starting
to think CentOS may be a better upstream home for that, since it's
aimed primarily at folks for whom the operating system is just "the
place where my code runs", rather than something they're interested in
helping to define. If the SCP ends up looking like it may also be
useful in developing Fedora itself, that would likely be a decision
for FESCo rather than us.
I think Environments & Stacks still has a useful role to play as a
discussion and advocacy group, the only part I'm questioning is the
need to be formally constituted as a working group, with elections and
formal voting procedures.
I have to admit I haven't thought about the changes above as something
that would influence E&S, but it does make sense to me after reading it
and giving a day to think more about it. And it's good that such things
happen, no matter where it is.
From my PoV there are still same directions where we want to go with
Fedora distro -- being more flexible, lowering barriers, etc. Even the
Component Pipeline is something I see valid for Fedora, maybe just piece
of it, not whole. But having that, it would be something that would
bring the missing flexibility.
That said, I mostly agree with the opinions here about the elections and
stuff.
honza