gnome 2.9

[Havoc Pennington]

On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 19:17 -0500, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> 
> As much as i appreciate and respect the fact that a lot of work has
> needed to be done inhouse to open up the technical tools for community
> contributors to get access to code and buildsystem. Having the
> technical tools like an open cvs are not going to help deal with the
> issue on how to manage and recruit volunteers with less overtly
> codemonkey tasks. It's debatable when the best time to strongly press
> the point, before or after the technical work to open up the
> buildsystem is completed. So I offer this as a friendly reminder and
> as a kindly display of loyal opposition to the current red hat
> internal priorities for the fedora project. There needs to be a
> schedule and a plan to deal with volunteer management issues.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but one thing I would argue is
that opening up the technical tools is absolutely central.

To me a key question is "can you have an external package maintainer?"
(and parallel questions like "can you have external translators," etc.)

Because the governance and decision making should be based on
maintainers/contributors, and that means there's no outside decision
making until you have a way for outsiders to be maintainers and
contributors. Of course people are contributing today, but there are
certain limits on what they can do from outside Red Hat.

It's not like most open source projects have any formal decision making
policy. It's really rough consensus of the core contributors.

Only my personal opinion, and I probably haven't heard many of the
discussions around this topic.

Havoc