freedesktop.org specification process

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On 2009/07/10 00:42, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> On Friday 10 July 2009 01:38:45 Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
>> Release teams ... I still don't agree with that ;)
>
> The rationale for having the release teams as the point of contact is that
> they already decide about dependencies of their software,

Maybe they do with KDE (and maybe with GNOME), but that's not true 
everywhere.  We (Xfce) decide about dependencies collaboratively at the 
start of the development cycle.

> they have an
> overview of what's being included and what's not, and they are used to these
> kind of balancing decision processes. Additionally each community is
> guaranteed to have a release team.

No, they really aren't.  In the past, we haven't decided on a "release 
team" (usually just one or two people) until we start the alpha/beta 
cycle for the next release.  (We have a plan to be a bit more formal 
about this stuff, but this is how it's worked in the past.)  Please 
understand that most projects don't have the resources to dedicate 
people to it.  Also understand that GNOME and KDE are unique in that 
they have a lot of paid developers.  Xfce is done entirely by volunteers 
in their free time.  I'm not sure, but I believe LXDE is similar in that 
regard.


> Another advantage of doing it via the release teams is that there is an actual
> team behind that, and it's not a single person, who could become a
> bottleneck.

Heh.  Not quite.

> We could also do something else like letting the formal organizations name
> representatives. But I like the simplicity of the release team approach.

Naming formal representatives basically sounds pretty much equal in 
terms of usefulness to the release team approach.  The only reason the 
release team idea is simpler is because it doesn't require selecting 
anyone.  Communication difficulties remain the same.

There's just no reason to need points of contact at all in the general 
case with a more decentralised system like the one Aaron suggests.  A 
point of contact might be useful in the case that there's an 
intra-project dispute, but one would hope they'd be few and far between 
(as someone mentioned, even with KDE's open-commit policy, there'd only 
been two issues over the past 10 years...  our communities are pretty 
trusting and that trust is rarely violated).

	-brian