followup regarding desktop specifications

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2004-07-30 at 10:19, George Kraft wrote:

> Is this the forum to discuss this?  Owen, could you post the initial 
> proposal you wrote up?

Ah, yes. To give a little background to the discussion, the problem
that we seem to have currently is that freedesktop.org is very
effectively producing a large body of specifications, but

 - Most of the standards aren't quite done
 - Most of the standards aren't quite interoperable as implemented
 - There is no identification of what *is* done.

So, what I suggested at the Desktop Conference at OLS and what people
were generally in favor of was a "Specifications Release" where every
6 month we publish a list of specification versions that are finished.

The initial proposal I wrote up is:

 http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/Process

It may look a little complex, but it is meant to be as lightweight
and simple as possible. Comments much appreciated.

> How often does freedesktop.org specification team conference call,  how 
> often does the group meet?

My feeling is that if we can avoid a conference call, I'd prefer to
do that :-). It tends to exclude people in odd timezones or people
doing stuff in there spare time.

I think the first thing to do is to agree on a process and a timeline,
and that should (IMO) be done here. If we need a conference
call as things get closer to a release, that's fine, but I'd rather
avoid having a conference call just to have a conference call.

> I think it wold be a good beginning to outline a specification process 
> and selection criteria, then build a priority list.  Below is a similar 
> structure the LSB Futures team has created:
> 
> http://www.linuxbase.org/futures/identification/
> http://www.linuxbase.org/futures/criteria/
> http://www.linuxbase.org/futures/candidates/

The way I'd like to drive this is to get people to volunteer to own
specification versions for the release. The release process should
be a coordinating process, not a technical process.

Regards,
						Owen

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