Minutes of openSUSE Board meeting 2022-01-31
Hey all, Here are the minutes for the January 31 meeting. These can also be viewed here: https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:Board_meeting_2022-01-31 = Minutes of openSUSE Board meeting 2022-01-31 = Board: Gerald, Axel, Gertjan, Neal, Syds Absent: Atilla, Maurizio Guests: Bill, Doug, Emily, Luna, Max, Lubos == Topic: openSUSE Membership == Bill: Suggests the Board asks for the state of membership applications/processing on a regular occurrence. It would add some more accountability for such a core function. Gerald: What would be a reasonable cadence? Neal: Quarterly? Bill: Seems reasonable, we should also report around election time too, since that's when most applications happen anyway. Emily: Would like to join the membership officials too. Bill seems to be doing everything and she's like to help out. Axel: Don't think the board can do this. Neal: It's actually one of the few things we can directly do. Gerald: Points out Wolfgang and others do plenty too. We shouldn't use this power to randomly add more people because it's not terribly polite. There's a lot of discussion about the particulars between Gerald and Bill. Emily: They seem to be full of people that do lots of things right now, and don't focus much on membership. Gerald: Historically the team was quite large and we were told even members of the team didn't precisely know who was on it, and some were missing in action. Plus they did not have ownership of their own mailing list or Wiki page, which has been/is being addressed now. The ones that were primarily processing things (Wolfgang and Dominique) are also very busy processing things around the last election. Bill was a good addition and perhaps adding Emily will help too. Bill: He proposed to the team to meet monthly, they didn't receive the idea well. Neal: Regular meetings are a rather new thing for teams, it's not a cultural norm yet. Hopefully it will be eventually. == Topic: Communication Platform Moderation == Gertjan: Atilla, Maurizio, and him have started figuring out all the platforms and made the first steps toward getting a central moderation group set up (mailing list, etc.). Reaching out to Jim from the forums, waiting for a response. Bill: Discovered there's already a moderator list that Sasi Olin owns, they'll be modifying that. == Topic: AlmaLinux sponsorship == Doug: AlmaLinux reached out again to sponsor. The Board generally seems fine about it. Would like to know what they want out of it though, since it's a bit odd. == Topic: openSUSE Leap 15.4 == Axel: Wants opinion on new release, thinks we'll shoot ourselves in the foot on default Python (3.6). Neal: This is a consequence of the Leap platform being based on SLE. We do have alternate interpreters that we can build community packages on top of. Python 3.6 is also the default in RHEL 8 and between Fedora EPEL and openSUSE community, we could probably continue supporting stuff on it by sharing effort. But we can also build modules in Backports against newer interpreters. Lubos: SUSE ships 3.6 as default for stable. And 3.9 as an alternate interpreter with no packages built against it. Neal: Points out that Tumbleweed is failing here, where 3.8 is still the default and neither 3.9 nor 3.10 never made it. We should sort that out first before tackling Leap. Newer stuff has to land in Factory first. Gerald: Leap (or SLE) are always about compromises. In software every (major) update fares a good chance of breaking something - and be it an unwarranted assumption It's difficult to handle this kind of stuff. If the community wants something like the classic (open)SUSE Linux releases branched from Tumbleweed, the community needs to take that on. Lubos: Our build system capacity for s390x is close to our limits, duplicating distro would push us past our limits. Neal: For the Python issue, we can just set up community support for them. == Topic: openSUSE Leap Micro 5.1 == Lubos: openSUSE meets Cardano (Leap Micro 5.1) * Requests board review: https://code.opensuse.org/leap/features/issue/59 -- Neal Gompa (ID: Pharaoh_Atem)
Hi, those minutes are quite old so not sure about the current status of some topics but still felt like I have to comment as individual member of the membership officials. (Especially my comments are my personal ones!) Am 14.03.22 um 13:55 schrieb Neal Gompa:
== Topic: openSUSE Membership ==
Bill: Suggests the Board asks for the state of membership applications/processing on a regular occurrence. It would add some more accountability for such a core function. Gerald: What would be a reasonable cadence? Neal: Quarterly? Bill: Seems reasonable, we should also report around election time too, since that's when most applications happen anyway.
Sounds reasonable to me to cross check since there is always a risk that for some reason some members are busy or distracted and some things get delayed.
Emily: Would like to join the membership officials too. Bill seems to be doing everything and she's like to help out.
I would like to understand where this impression is coming from?
Axel: Don't think the board can do this. Neal: It's actually one of the few things we can directly do. Gerald: Points out Wolfgang and others do plenty too. We shouldn't use this power to randomly add more people because it's not terribly polite. There's a lot of discussion about the particulars between Gerald and Bill. Emily: They seem to be full of people that do lots of things right now, and don't focus much on membership. Gerald: Historically the team was quite large and we were told even members of the team didn't precisely know who was on it, and some were missing in action. Plus they did not have ownership of their own mailing list or Wiki page, which has been/is being addressed now. The ones that were primarily processing things (Wolfgang and Dominique) are also very busy processing things around the last election. Bill was a good addition and perhaps adding Emily will help too.
I can confirm Gerald's points. But also let me add a few: Yes, there was (specifically in 2021) lack of timely processing of membership requests. This started mainly because of two things: - membership-officials disappeared over time and too few were left apparently. So for example I wasn't aware that my part now was not like 10% but rather 50% of the required attention. This together with the fact that connect never actively informed us about new requests was one of the issues led into last years situation - the tooling (connect) was decommissioned without a proper replacement As of today we still suffer partially from it. Our normal processes cannot be applied at this moment and we need to reorganize ourselves. The good thing is that Pagure sends notifications now at least and just to add this - there is NO backlog of applications and never has been really since the last elections.
Bill: He proposed to the team to meet monthly, they didn't receive the idea well.
Given the timing of the protocol and my mail history this seems to be a bad coincidence. Beginning of February all active members of the officials were agreeing to a possible good meeting day and time. So far we didn't arrange to meet finally though but from my point of view and understanding not because we "didn't receive it well" but because the final initiative to set it up didn't happen yet. Wolfgang
Hi
On 14. 3. 2022, at 21:39, Wolfgang Rosenauer
wrote: Hi,
those minutes are quite old so not sure about the current status of some topics but still felt like I have to comment as individual member of the membership officials. (Especially my comments are my personal ones!)
Am 14.03.22 um 13:55 schrieb Neal Gompa:
== Topic: openSUSE Membership == Bill: Suggests the Board asks for the state of membership applications/processing on a regular occurrence. It would add some more accountability for such a core function. Gerald: What would be a reasonable cadence? Neal: Quarterly? Bill: Seems reasonable, we should also report around election time too, since that's when most applications happen anyway.
Sounds reasonable to me to cross check since there is always a risk that for some reason some members are busy or distracted and some things get delayed.
Emily: Would like to join the membership officials too. Bill seems to be doing everything and she's like to help out.
I would like to understand where this impression is coming from? I am also curious where this impression comes from.
Axel: Don't think the board can do this. Neal: It's actually one of the few things we can directly do. Gerald: Points out Wolfgang and others do plenty too. We shouldn't use this power to randomly add more people because it's not terribly polite. There's a lot of discussion about the particulars between Gerald and Bill. Emily: They seem to be full of people that do lots of things right now, and don't focus much on membership. Gerald: Historically the team was quite large and we were told even members of the team didn't precisely know who was on it, and some were missing in action. Plus they did not have ownership of their own mailing list or Wiki page, which has been/is being addressed now. The ones that were primarily processing things (Wolfgang and Dominique) are also very busy processing things around the last election. Bill was a good addition and perhaps adding Emily will help too.
I can confirm Gerald's points. But also let me add a few: Yes, there was (specifically in 2021) lack of timely processing of membership requests. This started mainly because of two things: - membership-officials disappeared over time and too few were left apparently. So for example I wasn't aware that my part now was not like 10% but rather 50% of the required attention. This together with the fact that connect never actively informed us about new requests was one of the issues led into last years situation - the tooling (connect) was decommissioned without a proper replacement As of today we still suffer partially from it. Our normal processes cannot be applied at this moment and we need to reorganize ourselves. The good thing is that Pagure sends notifications now at least and just to add this - there is NO backlog of applications and never has been really since the last elections.
Bill: He proposed to the team to meet monthly, they didn't receive the idea well.
Given the timing of the protocol and my mail history this seems to be a bad coincidence. Beginning of February all active members of the officials were agreeing to a possible good meeting day and time. So far we didn't arrange to meet finally though but from my point of view and understanding not because we "didn't receive it well" but because the final initiative to set it up didn't happen yet. That surprised me as well - I also recall agreeing to suggested day and time and then nothing happening.
Cheers Martin
participants (3)
-
Martin Pluskal
-
Neal Gompa
-
Wolfgang Rosenauer