Hi, Am 27.11.2013 18:47, schrieb Richard Brown:
On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 17:40 +0100, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:
What do we want to achieve? Goals =================================
1) Add focus to increase alignment among contributors.
Why? for what purpose and to what end? Does that alignment include finding ways to make openSUSE and SLE more aligned such as introduced by Ralf Flaxa at oSC 14?
How do we address the obvious concern that adding 'focus' might disenfranchise contributors who do not agree with the chosen direction for that focus?
I don't see it as black and white and I see there should be some more focus sometimes. Having contributors is a good thing but if everyone just does what he wants it doesn't work out and doesn't result in a polished distribution.
2) Foster the community and the user base. - Starting from our current community, we want to keep increasing the number of contributors, specially those working on core parts of the distribution/project.
Sounds good, I agree
I guess nobody can disagree here ;-) neither do I.
- The openSUSE user base needs to grow. We propose to be even more open to new niches.
Why? More users is never a bad thing, but why do we *need* to grow the users? We could be a distribution by our contributors, for our contributors. What's the case that makes it clear we *need* to grow the number of users?
I would like openSUSE to stay relevant. For example relevant to stay (or get) supported from third party (yes, even closed source) software vendors. Relevant enough so people outside of the openSUSE community are seeing openSUSE as a relevant target to "integrate" with. If we just want to be "a distribution by our contributors, for our contributors" how many users will we have in a few years? More users will also increase the number of contributors.
3) Catalyze openSUSE maturity process. - openSUSE has an interesting number of contributors. Now we think it is time to reinforce our structures.
What is 'interesting' about the number of contributors? They've doubled in 3 years http://lizards.opensuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/obs_data_crop.png
Hmm, my view is probably a bit limited and focused on technical things but where exactly did it help? - quality of the distribution? - innovation? - more packages in Factory I agree with the last item but I see very few areas where we improved (technically) because of the number of contributors.
- Having more solid structures/groups will allow openSUSE to assume more responsibilities and deliver. - In general, we think we need few rules but good ones, easy to follow and analyze.
If we're talking about encouraging people to coalesce and work in 'Teams', similar to the way the GNOME team currently operates, I can certainly say it works very well for us and I can happily support the idea of promoting the approach to other parts of the Project.
the above depends on the rules in the end. Not much to comment here.
Enhanced Factory ================
We would like to put effort in Factory in the following direction:
* New process getting the best of Factory, Tumbeweed and devel projects. We need everybody contributing in a single point for a single purpose. We are just too few to spread efforts.
I can certainly see the benefit of such an idea. Are we talking about effectively 'obsoleting' Tumbleweed by making this 'new Factory' a stable, usable, rolling release?
I'd hope so. I really can imagine to use a more or less stable Factory on a desktop. Tumbleweed is still a bit scary for me for that purpose as it lives a bit outside of the development process. By having a really usable Factory we could do less releases but support them for a longer time probably (hopefully).
Overhauled openSUSE Release ===========================
All sounds very ambitious. I'm interested in hearing more
A new combination of stable Factory and new release model could absolutely fit into my own usecases. There are people who want the latest and greatest and even the 8 month release cycle is too long for them. They should use Factory. Others need a stable base for a longer time (than 18 months). (I actually need both ;-)) OBS provides a way to even get updates for the stable releases for certain components if needed.
* Technical governance model adapted to our new development processes: very few but clearer rules. Mentoring ecosystem.
This is certainly an area I'm interested in seeing what the rest of our community feels. Our current Governance body (The Board) is strictly forbidden from making Technical decisions.
I would really prefer someone to be able to make technical decisions if needed. The status quo seems to be that coolo is the one because someone needs to keep Factory working. So we will always need someone to decide and even when I basically trust coolo I think this is not the right approach.
I understand the philosophy for Technical Governance to date has largely been 'those who do, decide'. If changes are made in this area, I'd like to think they can keep that spirit, the idea anyone can get involved and that changes are made on their technical merits, not political ones (eg. does the submitter sit on the right steering group? who is their employer?)
Yes, no politics please. Just technical decisions to the best of the project. I also don't think that this task should be done by the board but by a different group of people. The 'those who do, decide' is basically something I support to an extend. But we had examples in the past that people who decided only "did it" halfway and put the burden onto the rest of of the community to fix their mess Wolfgang -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org