Notes on GNOME Development and Release Process Discussion
Presentation by Michael Meeks and Havoc Pennington
Notes by Louis Villa
Editing by Ben FrantzDale, Michael Meeks
- Michael has slides here: http://www.gnome.org/~michael/boston-2002/
- Havoc's formal proposal, for reference, is http://pobox.com/~hp/policy.html
[Ed: this page cannot be found. If someone knows where it is, let me know.]
- Havoc on RFP:
- RFPs are living documents. One can be changed if it sucks.
- We need a base set of requirements, such that all new things can reference them as appropriate.
- These are included by reference in future RFPs.
- Voters are basically covered by affected module maintainers.
- Nuisance RFPs are avoided by the necessity of getting > 3 maintainers to
agree to your RFP.
- What about non-maintainers who file stuff? How can we include them,
and yet ensure that it is the GNOME community that decides, and not some
even-more-arbitrary body?
- An RFP is specifically about setting out requirements for a solution, not for selecting a solution for the problem.
- Remember that RFP is the outcome of the process, which is then used to
evaluate solutions.
process.
- Mission statement sidetrack:
- This needs to be boiled down to one page.
- Michael: We need a vision.
- Michael: We need to add ‘who are we targeting’ to ‘what are we here for and what does it mean?‘
- HP: We should split goals from tactics.
- HP: Mission statement is what you are not willing to compromise on; tactics
are what you are willing to compromise on.
- The mission statement should include ‘put Free Software on the desktop’ [jeff: emphasize all desktops]
- Other possible goals: Owen: ‘fun’, hp: ‘make millions
of dollars’ [tongue in cheek].
- Billh: ‘Is accessibility a goal we are seeking to achieve or a
tactic by which we will achieve our goals, whatever they are’,
- alexg: ‘need to crush our enemies, by beating them on cost, on quality, on everything’.
- Lots of talk about bringing people in to GNOME, by improving libraries but also by bringing people in politically.
- Step one: ‘user comes first’ (suggested)