Call for proposals for the next governance meeting

[Sebastian Wick]

Personally I would say we could give it a go, but I don't believe that
this will significantly change how long some protocols take to get
merged. The group transaction is taking so long because the subsurface
sync and desync modes together with content update queues are hard to
get right and the protocol makes everything much worse. The color
management protocol took so long because it evolved with our
understanding of color and colorimetry which changed significantly
over the years. Some protocols are just stuck because stakeholders
can't agree and most of the time the problem is just time and
priorities.

On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 5:09 PM Austin Shafer <ashafer at nvidia.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Not a protocol, but I think it would be good to discuss the possibility
> of regular Wayland Governance meetings at a decided frequency. Currently
> meetings are scheduled on demand to discuss a particular subject or
> protocol, but I believe routine discussions could be very beneficial in
> progressing protocol designs.
>
> One issue we currently have is that many protocol proposals turn into
> multi year endeavors. Explicit Sync [1] is a recent example of this
> which was merged after two years, and surface group transactions [2] are
> still in review after four years. While these proposals are full of
> excellent discussions, if the time is measured in years I think that
> means there's room for improvement regarding how long it takes us to
> make forward progress. It can also be unclear who is interested in a
> protocol and for what reasons, or who depends on it to ship features in
> a particular release.
>
> As more distros switch to Wayland by default, I believe having more
> frequent/routine meetings would be a good investment to avoid
> indefinitely blocking new desktop features. Less formal conversations
> can also provide opportunities to see how implementations are
> progressing, ask for reviews, and get an idea of when protocols might be
> ready to land.  All of these could be beneficial for handling growing
> pains: more Wayland users means more feature requests. My hope is this
> could reduce the social burden of proposing a protocol or tracking its
> progress.
>
> That being said there are many open questions to answer:
> - Is there interest in formally making meetings at a certain time
>   interval, would the community find this useful?
> - How to decide on a time? Poll before every meeting?
> - How frequent should the regular meetings be? Monthly? Biweekly?
> - How far in advance would we decide on agenda/topics? Tentative agenda
>   sent out a week before with a call for topics?
> - Pain-points in the existing protocol approval process: would this help
>   them?
> - Should we track action items from the previous meeting and follow up
>   on their status?
> - Should there be "status updates"/pings for long-lived protocol proposals?
> - Possible agenda items for regular meetings. I have some initial ideas
>   but would appreciate more suggestions if there are any pressing
>   topics?
>
> Non-goals which I don't want to accidentally accomplish with this:
> - Rush discussions or rush protocols out the door
> - Force a schedule onto projects or contributors
>
> As always I'm open to any suggestions. I'm happy to drive the discussion
> on this in the next governance meeting, and also shoulder the
> organizational burden of doing these if we go forward with it.
>
> [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/90
> [2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/26
>
> Thanks!
>         Austin
>
> On 4/17/24 8:37 AM, Vlad Zahorodnii wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > The Wayland Governance Meeting is semi-regular meeting to drive
> > discussion on wayland-protocols forward.
> >
> > We are looking for the proposals for the next meeting as well as people
> > who can lead/drive the discussion. If there is a protocol that you would
> > like to be on the agenda, please submit your proposals here.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Vlad
> >
> >
>