Re: Random thoughts on this elections (was Re: Candidacy (Michael Meeks))

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Sergey,

I tend to agree with you, but many people have expressed great hesitancy
about having the board be too heavily involved in making technical
decisions beyond overseeing releases.  In the election overview document
(foundation.gnome.org/overview.html), we tried to touch on this issue by
saying that:

"The board will arbitrate technical disputes between maintainers."

So it doesn't quite give the board decision making authority, but it
provides for a role for them to help resolve the sorts of conflicts you
describe.  We can then see how that plays out over time.  The general
rule being to try and keep the board's role in technical issues very
limited, and maintaining existing ways of dealing with technical
conflicts as much as possible.

Bart



Sergey Panov wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Oct 14, 2000 at 11:05:41AM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > My impression is that people don't want the board making technical
> > decisions, thus the charter doesn't say that it will. The only
> > decision that's "technical" is the release schedule stuff, and that is
> > more a matter of asking the maintainers what schedule is going to
> > work, not telling them which schedule must work. I can't actually
> > remember a technical issue the interim steering committee has dealt
> > with.
> 
>  I am afraid you are wrong. Board will be eventually forced to make
> technical decisions, as there will be some disagreements on direction
> and standards.
> 
> The first few issues on the list are:
> 1) Standard installer/updater (from Eazel | Helix | RedHat )
> 2) What should stay in gnome-lib and what should go to gtk+
> 3) Eazel and Helix (and, at some point, RedHat and Sun) might
>    have different and contradicting views/requirements with
>    respect to design of some common parts (Bonobo, Gconf, OAF,
>    gnome-print, ...)
> 
> Some of those problems exist today and are being resolved in cooperative
> mode, but there were signs of potential conflicts. The board should
> be qualified to resolve those issues to prevent fighting and forking.
> 
> It is yet another reason why those companies representation should be
> balanced.
> 
> Sergey
> ------------
> Who jumped from kde to gnome mailing list the moment he saw Miguel
> GNOME announcement. Who was too busy/lazy to make any serious contribution
> (Used to work on Russian translations, and contributed some miniscule
> patches)
> 
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