freedesktop.org specification process

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:12:49 +0200
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org> wrote:

> On Sunday 12 July 2009 16:56:51 Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> >
> > We establish one or two persons per project as general
> > freedesktop.org contacts. Whether they are part of the release team
> > or not is irrelevant. These are the persons to contact when a new
> > spec or whatever is brought up. They are also the persons to
> > contact when per-specification contacts (see below) are
> > unresponsive.
> 
> This makes sense. But as kind of fallback and ultimate authority for 
> representing a community we need some kind of general point of
> contact. That's what the release team would be.

I really don't think you need a release team fallback if you pick 2+
leading persons from each project as its main fd.o contact. BTW, that
already *is* a fallback for the per-specification contacts.

> All this can be expressed in the organizations xml file, which is
> part of the specification repository:
> 
> http://gitorious.org/xdg-specs/xdg-specs/blobs/master/organizations.xml
> 
> > Together with the meta data which holds information on the adoption
> > of a spec in various projects, we list one or two persons per
> > project. These are the per-specification contacts which are ideally
> > involved in discussions and can be contacted e.g. for adoption
> > status updates before a new version of a spec is released or when
> > someone feels that a spec needs to be changed/improved. Ideally,
> > most of the communication happens on public mailinglists and via
> > the xdg-specs repository, so whenever a new projects wants to be
> > listed in the meta data of a spec, one of its developers can extend
> > the meta data with their own project information and request one of
> > the admins to merge this change.
> 
> For per-specification contacts there are the authors of the spec,
> which are listed in the specification meta data.

Uh, no, specification authors and people responsible for the
implementations in various projects can be very, very different. What
I'm trying to suggest is that we list 1+ persons per adopting
organization as a direct (not a general) contact point. This would be
persons who actually deal with the spec inside the adopting
organization, who are ideally involved in discussions about the spec
and are supposed to watch changes in the spec (if they are interested
in). These persons may or may not contribute to the spec.

Personally, I think this a very simple approach which is far better
than just having a release team and spec authors listed. And I think
it's important that these spec authors, general fd.o contact persons
and per-spec-and-per-adopter contact persons are allowed to but not
required to be the same.

  - Jannis
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