Re: Modules

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Fri, Jul 07, 2000 at 01:08:32PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>  - should a 100-lines-of-code applet really be given the same 
>    status as gnome-core?

As long as being a "project" doesn't neccessairly bring any voting rights, it
doesn't matter.  Any decision power should be with contributors, not with
projects.  Then if someone writes a 100-lines-of-code applet, quite likely
this does not have the same amount of serious contributors as gnome-core has.

Plus I think that this is not such a huge problem.  I think what it means for
a project to be a project of the gnome foundation would be that they are
doing things in accordance with some guidelines (such as using gnome-libs,
whatever...).  I think it's more of a stamp of approval by the gnome
foundation.

> (In general I would lean toward more central control than Debian has;
> they are effectively paralyzed by democracy at times, and their
> technical direction and social climate suffers in some ways as a
> result.)

I think Debian has more use for central direction then we do.  We have use
for real central direction in the libraries and in the desktop, but not for
all the projects.  There is no reason we need to release ALL the gnome
projects at once, and we have never done that.  I think the current model of
projects being autonomous almost completely is a good model.  Then the
foundation works more as a "forum" of where gnome should be going, but it
doesn't have to really make many decisions (because if you do make decisions,
how are you going to enforce them:).  So I don't think any central "control"
will work here.

Also the more such control you give to the foundation the more contravertial
the election process becomes, the more contraversial will be which packages
are part of gnome.  We also don't want to scare of new projects and
contributors by being a buerocratic controlling beast.  (Plus the term
"central control" reminds me of the industrial policy in socialism, which
didn't exactly work :)

> Of course, this whole issue may become more clear if we clarify what role
> a project actually plays in the organization, which is unclear to me
> right now. If projects are purely an informal way to organize
> technical stuff, and the membership list is what affects
> decision-making, then it's probably fine to be really informal about
> the list of projects.

This would be my feeling.  It would make life much simpler.

George

-- 
George <jirka@5z.com>
   I wanna be sedated.  -- Ramones