Charter

[Tadej Janež]

On Thu, 2013-11-07 at 12:08 +0100, Marcela Mašláňová wrote: 
> I asked Matt what he had in mind, when he named this group. He promised 
> to drop a mail about it, but probably didn't have time yet.
> 
> To quote him:
> <quote>
> I was definitely envisioning this group basically covering/coordinating
> everything on this slide http://mattdm.org/fedora/next/#24 in the
> "Ring 2" area. I know it's very broad.

Regarding Matt's view on our WG, please read slides 15 through 25 of his
Flock 2013 presentation: http://mattdm.org/fedora/next/
(video is also available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqoE-tqAQro)

> I suggest write document about all these areas and see what other groups 
> are proposing, what are they missing...

Yes, I agree.

My view of what this WG does is something along the lines of:
The Environment & Stacks WG curates the different stacks in Fedora (e.g.
Python 2, Python 3, PyPy; Ruby 1.9.x, Ruby 2.0.x; Perl 5.16, Perl 5.18,
Perl 6; Java 7, Java 8; MySql, MariaDB; JBoss AS 7, Wildfly; ...). That
means it:
1) Creates/provides the necessary guidelines/policies on how to handle
different (incompatible) versions of the stacks.
2) Creates/provides new guidelines/policies that enable inclusion of new
stacks in the Fedora project, which would be impossible under current
Fedora packaging guidelines (e.g. bundled libs okay, overriding versions
of software in Base/Core, maybe even non-RPM packaging).
3) Implements the means (e.g. SCLs, build systems that handle SCLs,
rel-eng tools that can handle SCLs) to include these stacks in the
Fedora project.
4) Implements/packages concrete stacks (e.g. PyPy, Ruby 2.0.x), with
emphasis on emerging new stacks, since "older" stacks (e.g. Python 2,
Python 3) are already implemented within Fedora's current packaging
guidelines.

My wish for the guidelines/policies under 2) is that they are more
flexible/relaxed so that it is possible to include new stacks with their
specific quirks. In essence, I wish all (legaly allowed) stacks could
find their place in Fedora and people would not be limited to our
current packaging guidelines/policies.

I don't grasp the Environments part yet. On the slides, Matt gives this
definition: "Environments are where you run the code you care about".
Later, he talks about different desktop environments, app containers,
Platform as a service decoupling, Core image... I'm not familiar with
other things, but I would say that different desktop environments are
more in the domain of the Workstation WG.

Regarding the R&D part that some you talked about, I think our group
could also experiment with new way of doing traditional packaging (e.g.
automation, upstream integration, better way of handling patches through
git than the current manual way, ...). We could use the new policies and
technologies for our things and later, when they are mature and tested,
the Base WG could adopt them.

Tadej