question for board members

[Mike McGrath]

On Fri, 7 May 2010, Michael Schwendt wrote:

> On Thu, 06 May 2010 15:07:51 -0700, Jesse wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 16:18 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> >
> > > We've seen the project continue to grow but scale poorly.  Our packagers
> > > used to be able to do anything they wanted,
>
> What does that refer to? The sheer size of the package repositories?
>

To me this refers to several seemingly unrelated problems that all, upon
closer inspection, really seem to be scale issues and includes everything
from how often pushes break, to how often rawhide breaks, to how often we
slip releases to confusion about "what to do next" when joining Fedora to
many team's inability to come to a consensus to how bad we are at
predicting and meeting deadlines.

All of this stuff both worked better and was simpler when we were smaller
which is why I call it a scale issue.  Calling it "growing pains" might be
more familiar to some.

> Fedora's Packaging Guidelines and Policies are so overwhelming, they
> have always frightened off potential contributors. And still, Fedora
> has opened the flood gates by focusing on "package review metrics" --
> quantity instead of quality -- which made some reviewers approve niche
> market packages, which in some cases are not even used by their packagers
> on a daily basis. Later, Fedora has made it easier for packagers to ignore
> bug reports by simply waiting for automated scripts to close them.
>

One could say the quality vs quantity thing applies our volunteers too.
I've seen WAY more turnover in the last year then years past on the
Infrastructure team despite lots of work to do and lots of work handed
out.  At least there I don't know that we're attracting the right kind of
volunteers.  I'm worried our "every user is a potential volunteer" push
might be back firing a bit.  Fedora's a large free software community, I'm
not sure it's the biggest but it's a big one.

	-Mike