How this all works... [was Re: 2.4 Proposed Modules - 2 weeks left]

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 07:49, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> Of course, in the case of Gnome this "considering" 
> basically consists of various people sending heated mails on mailing 
> lists, and finally the release team gets to "interpret" this and come up 
> with what they think is our decision as a group.

There seems to be some grumbling about this method. I'm not very
comfortable with it either- it puts too much power in the hands of a
small group of fairly inbred people who have fairly set ways of looking
at the GNOME world. Problem being I'm not sure how else to do it.
Really, it's the problem with all GNOME decisions and actions- it boils
down to someone taking some type of initiative and doing it, and that's
frequently not the best way to do things. 

$UNNAMED_NAUTILUS_HACKER_WHO_HAS_BEEN_KNOWN_TO_BE_CALLED_CPN_PRINTMAN
has suggested[1] that the key is mainly to enlarge the number of people
approving the relevant GEP. It's currently basically the release team.
$HACKER suggests it be release team + team leads (a11y, QA, docs, i18n)
+ current maintainers of core modules + proposed maintainers.

This would make the process slightly more unweildy (bad) but reduce the
appearance and the actuality of the release team basically making
decisions for the rest of GNOME unilaterally (good.)

Does anyone have other suggestions? Does anyone care?

Luis

[1] I'm paraphrasing, the discussion was two months ago and so any
shortcomings in this approach should be assumed to be because of my
failure to recall things, not in his original ideas.