Re: Draft of Proposal for the GNOME Foundation.

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Joe Shaw <joe@helixcode.com> writes:

> 
> Nat and I discussed this, and here is our reasoning for it:
> 
> We really can't make a GNOME release without unanimous agreement from all
> the project maintainers. If Jacob doesn't want to do a gnome-core release,
> we really can't make him and he can sandbag and delay a release
> indefinitely. There's simply nothing we can do about that.

Well, we could just continue to use the old gnome-core release if it's
compatible.
 
> Now, in the event that a module maintainer doesn't want to release, we
> have a few choices. The first is that we kick that module out. We could do
> this for stuff like gnome-media, etc. but it isn't possible for stuff like
> gnome-core. Secondly, we can delay the release until the module maintainer
> wants to do a release. Generally, if a module maintainer really -really-
> doesn't want to do a release, he has a pretty good reason for it and it's
> worth hearing. Lastly, we could fork it, but that's obviously very very
> bad and let's not even talk about that.

I think it's all a matter of how you state it. Yes, clearly we ought
not even try to force unreasonable release dates on a module
maintainer. But when you say things like requiring unanimous consent,
rather than requiring consensus, or just leaving the issue up to
common sense, that sounds to me like it's giving module maintainers a
green light to withhold their consent for reasons not directly related
to their ability to make a release, for example, maintainer of package
gnome-foo says "I don't agree to this release date unless you also
include my other package, gnome-bar" or even "I don't agree to this
release date unless the maintainer of gnome-frozen will accept my
patch of questionable merit". 

 - Maciej