Re: Defining GNOME software (finally)

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 9:10 AM Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 9:04 am, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>
> wrote:
> > I think if you're making decisions that aren't recorded then how does
> > that get communicated to the board if there are no formalisms?
> > Granted, I think most of those decisions that are made on irc are
> > fairly pedestrian and is not particularly worth nothing - but without
> > some formalism you have no framework on what is of interest and what
> > isn't, no?
>
> Right, since decision-making is handled informally, we currently have
> no process for deciding what to report to the board. We've never done
> this before outside our team report at GUADEC so I'm not sure how we
> would handle this.

Right, so culturally - this might be a bit of a challenge for you all
so I would try to figure out how to do these things in an automated
way. I'm not sure how formal the board wants - I'm sure Allan can help
here. But I think the first step is just figure out what the board
would find noteworthy and then filter from there.

I think some decisions are worth putting into a gitlab issue so a
query would all be required to document decisions made.

That way things like freeze breaks and other stuff is just done on the
mailing list before, but something that board would be interested in
could be discussed with more formality.

> > Regarding "what is GNOME?" - this always ended up being more political
> > in the past because invariable people are interested in the branding
> > as being core means that we have a different set of expectations.
> >
> > Changes made to the buildstream configs - is there a process there
> > given that it could be political?
>
> Besides normal GitLab code review, we require approval by Javier or
> myself for additions or removal to core, plus additional approval by
> Allan for changes to meta-gnome-core-utilities (which we might rename
> or split because that contains all the non-developer applications, not
> just "utilities").

Utilities does not seem very descriptive perhaps it is a feature not a
bug. - importance hidden behind a mundane name.

Thanks for that. Do you care about external dependencies - meaning we
add things to our toolchain  - are they scrutinized? For instance,
picking up some library that has one person supporting it might raise
eyebrows. Curious if those are things the board would be interested in
knowing or a power that the release team should wield or does in fact
wield. (I'm not sure how on-topic this part is so if you want to
answer maybe that is worth a separate thread)

sri
>