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

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Sergey Panov <sipan sipan ne mediaone net> writes: 
>  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.
>

You can wish the board could decide this kind of issue, but it
can't. Because it doesn't have any coercive power.
 
> The first few issues on the list are:
> 1) Standard installer/updater (from Eazel | Helix | RedHat )

If the board said "Red Hat can't use its installer/updater" I feel
very confident that our response would be to ignore the board
totally. The board has no business deciding which company gets to own
the updater. I think Eazel and Helix will have much the same opinion.

> 2) What should stay in gnome-lib and what should go to gtk+

The maintainers of gnome-libs and gtk+ would totally ignore the board
on this point.

> 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, ...)
>  

Here the board can try to arbitrate (which is already pointed out in
the overview, as Bart says), but ultimately if e.g. I as GConf
maintainer say "hell no the board is on crack" the board can't do
anything about it aside from sanction a GConf fork. And that is not
something we want to see happen.

> 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.
> 

That would be nice, but isn't feasible. The board doesn't have any
power to make people do work.

If the board tries to take over maintainer roles it will just have
everybody pissed off and get nowhere. It can only try to get
maintainers to do the right thing. And GNOME has to be careful not to
rely on packages with unreasonable or incompetent maintainers.

The board's technical decisions are more or less limited to deciding
which packages are part of GNOME and planning the release of those,
because those are group decisions that have to involve all of GNOME.

Havoc