Re: Defining GNOME software (finally)

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 1:00 pm, Allan Day <aday gnome org> wrote:
> The basic idea we discussed was to have the Release Team act as a
> committee of the board, and maintain some simple documentation about
> what GNOME's official software is. At the time it seemed that you were
> OK with that, and Matthias added a stub to one of your wiki pages [1].

I think we're OK with this. If anyone objects, please say so now.

> To move forward, we'll need the wiki page filled out, so we can see
> the list of modules which are official GNOME software. Is someone able
> to do that?

We can add an updated list to the wiki for convenience, but it's 
inevitable that it will become stale in the future. So I propose that 
we have the wiki page say that the canonical definition of "what is 
GNOME?" is the list of BuildStream elements listed in 
meta-gnome-core-developer-tools.bst, meta-gnome-core-os-services.bst, 
meta-gnome-core-shell.bst, and meta-gnome-core-utilities.bst. We can 
have a list on the wiki for convenience as long as it's clear that 
gnome-build-meta is the canonical definition. Hi release team, does 
this sound OK? Any objections or change proposals? Note it 
intentionally does not include SDK components like GTK or GLib. We 
could potentially expand the definition to include SDK components 
hosted on gitlab.gnome.org, but that would require splitting up sdk.bst.

To make sure we don't have misplaced expectations, please remember that 
this list cannot be used for deciding what repositories go into the 
GNOME/ group on GitLab, because probably 90% of the stuff currently 
there is not core and is therefore excluded from our definition, and 
also because we add and remove things from core on a semi-regular basis 
(e.g. we just removed gnome-themes-extra earlier this week). I continue 
to recommend allowing experienced GNOME developers to create new 
repositories there as needed.

> We'll also need you to confirm that the member list [2] is
> up to date.

That member list is kept up to date, yes.

> We'd also like to know if you want to keep the Release Team name, or
> whether you'd prefer to switch to "Release Committee" or "Engineering
> & Release Committee", or anything else. It's up to you.

I think we're fine with release team.

> You should also know that becoming a committee will involve some small
> changes [3]:
>
>   - You'll need to have membership changes ratified by the board
>   - You'll need to have a chair, and minuted meetings
>   - You'll need to keep the board informed about how things are going

Having membership changes ratified seems fairly low cost. We normally 
hold one formal meeting per year, which we take private notes on, so 
the only change there would be to make those minutes formal and public. 
Most of our decision-making occurs on IRC, and not as part of any 
formally organized meeting, and therefore is not minuted. Then keeping 
the board informed about goings-on also sounds low cost. So this all 
sounds fine to me. If anyone wants to object, please do so now.

Michael