Improving freedesktop.org

[Frans Englich]

On Thursday 31 August 2006 19:29, Bastian, Waldo wrote:
> I'm trying to formulate a few student projects to improve
> freedesktop.org Over the last year I have heared several suggestions
> that would be helpful to make freedesktop.org more successful. If people
> have specific ideas with regard to things they would like to see
> improved (website / wiki / project support / spec support / etc.) please
> reply to this mail. Please keep me in the CC if you forward this mail to
> other mailinglists.

I think it depends on how one sees Free Desktop and what its goals are. Here's 
a scenario I recently went through:

I considered spec'ing bindings for allowing XQuery/XPath to interface DBus. A 
question hit me: should I push this spec and its test suite through Free 
Desktop or should I go through W3C(via the XQuery WG or as a note)? The 
former is straight forward. Doing the latter runs into the problem that the 
bindings-spec would have a higher editorial quality, and, as I see it, 
problems with referencing the DBus spec.

In Free Deskto, there are no editorial guidelines, no URI/site persistence 
policy(What can I link to that will work the next month too?) or defined 
change control(what specs will change? What can be reliably referenced?)

For some types of work it would be more or less necessary to solve these kind 
of issues. Perhaps the problem is that Free Desktop is torn between being a 
huge whiteboard for brain storming(which it is good at and how people treat 
it) and being a platform for publishing specifications(also how people treat 
it, but which it currently is not very good at).

I think rigging Free Desktop into being sensible for publishing involves lots 
of work and *money* -- not randomly, unreliably improvements.

However, I don't think that's the way. There are already others who do that 
reasonably well -- W3C, ISO, RFC Editor. Free Desktop would probably just 
duplicate that(at best) instead of investing effort somewhere else.

I think the wisest thing to do is to turn Free Desktop into a huge whiteboard 
and push the specifications into standard bodies. The latter would indeed be 
part of Free Desktop's mission, in order to ensure that it actually happen, 
instead of them staying on FD's server(such as turning DBus into an RFC).


Cheers,

		Frans