openSUSE allhands meeting 2005-12-14 disclaimer: The following document covers a meeting of the openSUSE team. It summarizes expectations, concerns, ideas and opportunities around the openSUSE project. It is a rough collection of bits and pieces, neither complete nor final. Please note that these meeting minutes do not reflect any official Novell statement or any binding roadmap or schedule. It is open for discussion and improvement and reflects solely the ideas and opinion of the individual participants. present: aj, holgi, hvogel, mlasars, freitag, cthiel, jw, skh, mls, fs, bg, mruewckert, sp, froh missing: michl, adrian, cschum Minutes: jw, sp TOPICS 1) Chances 2) Risks 3) Expectations 4) Discussion - (Hosting, Rear Cover, Communication, Provo, Force, Workload) 5) Next Steps Non-participants receiving AIs: adrian, michl, ro, mmj and ea. 1) Chances ========== Just like the list that was put to gether at the BST offsite meeting, this expresses our hopes for openSUSE. * Real involvement of the community * Mind share / market share * Access to new user groups * Awaken enthusisam for Open Source inside Novell (again) "paint Novell (more) green". * openSUSE could be a central repository for OSS. Not for hosting source, but as "DistForge". * openSUSE could become the driving force behind all Novell Linux products. * We define a new standard for collaborative packaging and distribution building. * become an open platform, suited for experimenal development * strengthen the "SUSE Linux" brand. * Create the world's very best Linux distribution - * and finally: - rule the World (any volunteers?) 2) Risks ======== * The openSUSE project fades away (both, inside and outside of Novell), or does gain momentum soon enough. * It is unclear, how the community can participate. * The wiki may prove to be an insufficient platform for communication. * We try to change everything except ourselves. (Ouch, this one went deep! Thanks Henne) * openSUSE causes fear, uncertainty and doubt at some places inside and outside Novell. * Hosting turns out to be more difficult than expected. (e.g. time delay between Nbg and Provo) * openSUSE may create so much diversity (in packages and distributions) that clarity gets lost. How do we address that? 3) Expectations =============== Some really realistic items. General Expectations -------------------- * Experience full rear cover from Novell. * Offer a platform for building any distribution. - including those with different packaging formats. * The openSUSE team must grow far beyond the core team that we have now. AJ envisions that all of Suse and Novell is doing openSUSE. Expectations for today ---------------------- An attempt to make an agenda while half way through the meeting. * define short term Action Items. What shall we do tomorrow? * Identify all current blocker issues. * Improve Communications - precisely how to change the current situation? * Resolve conflicting messages (Ask 10 people get 11 answers). Reduce uncertainties, raise confidence. 4 Discussion ============ Hosting ------- - mrueckert currently maintains from Nuernberg a wiki located in Provo. Time shifts and turnaround times within the company are challenging. - we generally suffer from the time shifts within Novell * translated wiki pages are still not ready. - We failed to understand many issues, feedback is lacking. We resort to guesswork: * Klaas clarifies that our rapid wishes for software upgrade collide with e.g. our security policies of the data center. - A new naming idea surfaced. We are not a 'SourceForge', but a 'BinaryForge' as we host (RPM) Binaries. -> 'DistForge'? Rear Cover ---------- We are unsure, how far this project will go. We fear that all openSUSE activities have certain limits, but these are diffuse. We have identified the following issues: - How to deal with sensitive, internal information and how to qualify what information shall be made public by an official press anouncement of Novell? - Most of us would be fully booked even without openSUSE. How much time can we spend which openSUSE? - openSUSE is positioned as a market enabler not as a profit line Stefan responds with these rules of thumb: * We have full commitment from Novell to provide the required resources, if we can sufficiently demonstrate that openSUSE is a success. This focusses mainly on hardware but also covers man power to a certain degree: 1) We are encouraged to get as many people inside Novell involved as we can. 2) New people can be hired as trainees, studend for diploma works. * We may disclose as much and as early as we feel safe ourselves. When in doubt, inform the upper management beforehand, but do not wait for any objections longer than a week. * "Don't ask for approval, ask for forgiveness" The idea is, not to thwart ourselves. * continuosly raise issues with the projects for management attention where needed (AI: aj, skh) We agree in case of doubt to not wait for any official blessings, but meanwhile work with Stefan's rules of thumb whereever reasonable. General communication issues (external) --------------------------------------- * The community cannot see what is checked in and when. - establish an opensuse-checkin mailinglist. (AI: mls, fs) Automatically forward dist-mails containing the recent cangelog entires there for all packages that appear on an openSUSE distribution. * migrate internal mailing lists to opensuse.org Candidates are: packagers, suse-network, devel-ftl, devel-gcc?, mobile? Non-candidates are: kernel and other mailing lists where security issues or servicepacks are discussed. (AI: hvogel visiting teamlead-meetings, mmj) * No more private status meetings. - open up as public IRC discussions, as excercised last monday. on a regular bi-weekly schedule. presumably 16h-17h MEST, or alternating time frames if required. Suggestion: collect agenda items in the wiki. AI: hvogel uses devel-ftl for the last time to announce the first meeting. - voting in such a meeting may be difficult. We must not raise expectations above the limits that novell can fulfill. - have internal coordination meetings only on demand (AI: adrian) * Make teams available interactivly. We should have one contact person per openSUSE team. Simply lingering around at IRC is not sufficient. We should offer instant messaging. AI skh: ask teams to update their wiki pages to include preferred means of contact (mailing list and/or IM/IRC nicks and networks) Encourage ----- Henne: We are in the postition that we can actively encourage and involve SUSE employees towards the openSUSE community. * sp votes for applying only mild force :-) * Klaas prefers to lure people by offering added value. Discussion results in the following order of precedence: First inform, then ask, then persuade, then actively help and support. Information should be forwarded via teamleads. Workload -------- Project managers book resources from the teamleads. SLES10, SL10.1 deadlines are all before FOSDEM. Freitag endangers the future of his FATE project, by involving his team too deeply into openSUSE. Adding random resources from all over Novell is probably insufficient. 5) Next Steps ============= Short-Term Action Items ----------------------- * Make a Christmas-Theme or just some greeting for the Wiki. (AI: Henne, put some nice snow into the graphics) * Migrate mailinglists as defined above (AI: hvogel) * Announce preferred interactive contact per team at each team's wiki page. Details above. (AI: skh) Medium-Term Action Items ------------------------ * Strive for Opensource Build Service (AI: skh, aj) * clean up product naming. - 'openSUSE' vs. 'Suse LINUX OSS' is not correctly distinguished in the community or in the press. (AI: michl, aj) - 'eval', 'retail', 'plus' are not well defined. (AI: michl, aj, fs, hvogel, skh) * consolidate openSUSE web forums. There are several external opensuse-forums, that are willing to merge. None of the external forums comes with a defined long term commitment. Novell shall run an openSUSE web forum as a beta-test now. This Novell-forum relies on commercial software, which was inadequate in previous releases. (AI: michl, cthiel) * FOSDEM Build Service Prototype (AI: freitag, ro) - Budgetplan FOSDEM (AI: sp) -- o \ Juergen Weigert paint it green! __/ _=======.=======_ <V> | jw@suse.de wide open suse_/ _---|____________\/ \ | 0911 74053-508 (tm)__/ (____/ /\ (/) | __________________________/ _/ \_ vim:set sw=2 wm=8