Re: How we make decisions... [Fwd: Re: Proposal: replacing esound with polypaudio in 2.10]

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

On Fri, 2004-11-12 at 11:54, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-11-12 at 11:58 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 19:48 -0800, Sri Ramkrishna wrote:
> > > I've been watching this thread "Proposal: replacing esound with
> > > polypaudio ] and I've grown annoyed by how we as a project make
> > > decisions.
> > 
> > Maintainers are the real authority when it comes to technical decisions.
> > Everything else is just discussion.
> > 
> > So, maybe you should identify the Desktop and Platform maintainers who
> > are currently using sound APIs and push them for a decision. I don't
> > think we need a definite yes from all of them, but we shouldn't have a
> > no from any of them. Just an idea.
> 
> Maybe have more clearly defined working groups. So maintainers for
> gnome-media, gstreamer and libgnome are all listed in the "Sound Working
> Group" and maintainers for panel and applets are in the "Panel and
> Friends Working Group". Similar to how Nautilus, EEL and GNOME-VFS kind
> of loosely joined.

	It sounds good in principle, but there are some obvious problems:

  1) Do you really want to so clearly define who's opinion is relevant 
     and who's isn't. If you had drawn up the "Sound Working Group" 
     membership list to discuss this, would you have included Alan? 
     Probably not, and Alan's input to the discussion has probably been
     the *most* useful.

  2) Don't you run the risk of "Oh, the Sound Working Group is handling
     that, I don't need to worry about it" putting off talented 
     newcomers getting involved?

  3) You arbitrarily warp the priority queue of the people you put on 
     these working groups. You put Anders on the working group because 
     he's the libgnome maintainer and he'll likely feel forced to go off
     and spend a substantial amount of time researching the issue. But
     its probably *better* that Anders isn't getting distracted by the
     issue and spending his time working on what *he* considers a 
     priority.


	I'd encourage people who are complaining about our decision making
process to go back and consider the GEP process:

  http://developer.gnome.org/gep/gep-0.html

	Now, everybody hated the GEP process because it felt way too
heavyweight and GEPs were, by and large, never concluded. The former
problem is certainly solvable, but I'm not sure about the latter.
Possibly have an number of people who own the overall job of making
people bring GEPs to a conclusion, any conclusion.

	The process did have some nice properties, though:

  - It made people think about what they were trying to achieve:

      + Why do we need a new sound server?
      + What do we really need to be better in our new sound server?
      + What worked well with the old one?

  - It defined a group of people who were going to voluntarily take
    on the responsibility of co-ordinating the discussion

  - It documented the discussion


	I think I'd be happy to try and resurrect the GEP process in a much
more lightweight form if I thought there would be any enthusiasm for it.

Cheers,
Mark.