wayland-protocols scope and governance

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2019 18:18:40 +0100
Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:

> Hi Drew,
> Thanks for writing this up! I think the broad concept is fine, but a
> few things jump out at me:

Hi,

thank you Drew indeed, you have clearly put a lot of thought in this.
It looks largely fine to me as well, and I pretty much agree with
Daniel.

> 
> On Fri, 5 Apr 2019 at 19:43, Drew DeVault <sir at cmpwn.com> wrote:
> > I've written up a governance document for us to bikeshed, which is
> > included at the end of this email. Some comments upfront.
> >
> > Logistical notes:
> >
> > - We'll need a wayland-protocols mailing list. This should probably be
> >   members only, to reduce noise.  
> 
> Hmm, I don't love this requirement, to be honest.
> 
> On the members-only front, I think it's important for us to be open
> and accessible to new voices, and not create a larger, more
> documented, cabal. I think the list should definitely be open to
> public discussion and contribution. Especially if we're developing
> protocols which are focused on external interaction, we'll want to be
> able to have experts from those areas contribute.

I'm not sure if members-only referred to reading or only posting, but
if it is a place for technical discussions, then it needs to be free
for all.

If it is only for member's voting and such, then limiting posting to
members might be ok. However, I'm not sure there is a need for a
mailing list just for that. We can collect votes as comments in Gitlab
issues or merge requests and cross-check with the member list.

Reading your proposal, the mailing list seems to be intended for all
communications, not just members' voting. Particularly, new member
candidates are intended to post to the mailing list, so it cannot be
members-only.

> On the mailing list front, I think wayland-devel@ is probably quiet
> enough these days - and focused on common protocol-like stuff - that
> we could probably just reuse that list.

I'd be in favour of using wayland-devel@ at least to start with.

> But that being said, I would strongly advocate for doing review
> through GitLab. For the implementations and users I can think of -
> Chromium, EFL, Enlightenment, Firefox, GStreamer, GTK, KWin, Mesa,
> Mutter, Qt, SDL, Weston, wlroots - plus Wayland core itself, all of
> them use web review tools (Bugzilla x1, Gerrit, GitHub, GitLab,
> Phabricator, Reitveld x1) as their sole review method with the
> exception of Mesa, which also allows mailing-list submissions. I get
> that sr.ht is working on a decent mailing-list review workflow, but
> what we have today with Patchwork definitely isn't that.
> 
> There are a few things I dislike about mailing-list review, including
> barrier to entry (not subscribed when the patch was sent? you don't
> get to participate in review; don't have git-send-mail set up with a
> SMTP gateway? you don't get to submit patches at all), built-in
> amnesia (easy to lose track of comments made on previous revisions of
> patches, or keep track of what has and hasn't been fixed), baroque
> tools (git-pw is definitely worse than being able to fetch a real Git
> branch), impedance mismatch (losing information e.g. proper ancestry
> when posting), as well as ecosystem health (the fd.o Patchwork fork is
> only maintained by Intel's DRM team and its upstream isn't
> particularly vibrant; sr.ht could be promising but doesn't yet have
> wide adoption).
> 
> Given that, I'm prepared to push hard for using web-based review as
> the status-quo for how we all do our own protocol development anyway.

I agree, Gitlab is the way today.

> > - Establish initial membership and status of each protocol
> >   1. State your intention to be a member, including your point of
> >      contact and justification per section 1.1, or objection to section
> >      1.1's requirements  
> 
> I think Weston should be a member, and the two obvious points of
> contact would probably be myself and Pekka. I have no idea if Pekka is
> interested in doing it or not; I would be happy to do it.

I can be the second contact, sure.


The proposal has two 4.b sections. That's the only typo/grammar thing
catching my eye. Well written.


Thanks,
pq
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