Re: Release coordination - a clarification

[Seth Aaron Nickell <snickell Stanford EDU>]

Maintainers cannot be clearly designated for every decision, and I don't 
think they should be. Decisions that are really about GNOME as a whole 
can't clearly be passed to two or three maintainers. We need a grand-high 
maintainer of the GNOME project, but I don't think its reasonable to hand 
that much control over to any single individual. 

Only one body seems to reasonably have the authority to make such choices, 
and that is the same body that elected the Foundation board (that is, 
everyone with CVS access and then some). By extension the foundation board 
may be empowered to make these choices (and I believe they intend to in 
cases of extreme conflict), but in the general case the foundation board 
has voiced that it doesn't want to be involved with technical decisions.

I don't think we ever got to the point in the gconf/bonobo-config dispute, 
for example, where voting would have been desirable. BUT, I think it would 
have been worth having a "show of hands" regarding various solutions to 
the duplication of configuration systems. Show of hands is a very 
effective technique for trying to reach consensus in a group of live 
people, and I think it would be worth exploring how we might reach a 
similar effect using electronic means.

-Seth

On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 07:44:03PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I don't think popular vote makes any sense for technical decisions,
> I like the RFP mechanism where involved maintainers decide a lot more.
> 
> Havoc