Re: Candidacy: Ryan Lortie

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

hi Andy,

On Mon, 2011-05-23 at 20:58 +0200, Andy Wingo wrote: 
> > For a while the foundation board has largely taken a hands-off approach
> > when it comes to technical decisions.  In my opinion this has allowed a
> > number of problems to develop.
> 
> Can you mention some examples?

The most pressing example that I can currently think of is the lack of
definition of the purpose of the GNOME platform: does our platform exist
solely to implement the GNOME desktop (with gnome-shell) or does it
exist as a set of generally-useful libraries available to outsiders?  If
it meant for use by outsiders then how much consideration to this point
do we give when people approach us with patches that are useful to them
but not directly to our vision for the GNOME desktop?

I don't want to have this discussion in this thread, but it seems like
everyone has slightly different ideas about where we should be on this
spectrum.  The lack of consistent message is causing some very serious
distress to our downstreams.

More generally, though, during the last cycle I've heard a lot of talk
from many different people about many decisions that seemed to be made
in an opaque way.  The removal of screensavers and the addition of the
gnome-session 'fail whale' come to mind as two decisions that I've heard
a lot of complaints about.

I'm not saying that I disagree with those choices or that every single
decision should be run past some central body, but it would be nice if
such a thing was even a possibility and it would be _really_ nice if I
could point people there when they share their complaints with me.

> > I believe, however, that this situation occasionally causes friction
> > when trying to push large changes to the platform and desktop.  There
> > have also been cases when outsiders to the project have encountered
> > problems with a particular maintainer and felt that they have no
> > recourse.
> 
> I think I'm missing the back-story here.

No major backstory.  Just lots of small fails along the way.  Everyone
has a story about running into trouble with getting patches accepted
somewhere.  It's not to say that the maintainer wasn't correct to reject
the patch in the first place, but as an outsider it's very easy to get
the idea that a particular maintainer has a personality problem or that
they secretly hate you (or the company that you work for).

> What would you do with this power?

I'm unsure that I would put myself into consideration for this position.

That's a bit of a cop-out, but the truth is that I don't have too many
strong opinions on the direction that we go.  At least, I don't see
myself as any sort of visionary and I think that there are others that
would be far better suited to the role.  I simply want for there to be a
direction and for that direction to be communicated clearly.

Cheers