Decisions we didn't intend to make [Was: Minutes of the meeting (2006-07-31)]

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Elijah Newren">

> Here are the minutes from today's meeting.  Let me know if I've made any
> errors.

Apologies for not making the meeting, I was flying back from the USA, and
didn't realise it was on. I know this is late commentary, but I figured it
was important:

> Accepting gtk# apps in the desktop:
> ===================================
> 
> Obviously a hot topic, much like evolution and epiphany/galeon from
> previous releases.  No choice will make everyone happy (not even
> everyone on the release-team) but most of us agreed that the
> following middle ground seems to be the best representation of
> community consensus that we are able to find:
> 
>    New modules may be accepted into the desktop or admin releases
>    with a dependency on gtk#/mono, but any modules accepted into
>    either of those release sets without a dependency on gtk#/mono may
>    not gain one without going through the proposal process again in a
>    subsequent release.

I am *really* surprised that this decision was made and published, given
that on numerous occasions it was clearly stated within the team that we
were *not* going to make a broad decision about Gtk# applications in the
Desktop suite... Preferring to focus on the question of Tomboy inclusion
*alone* in this release cycle. I recently sent a long mail to d-d-l in an
attempt to clarify the situation, and split out all the conflated issues
that the community was fighting about. I wanted to make it abundantly clear
that all of these issues can be separated out and *are* different. Now, we
have the release team conflating this issue with Tomboy's inclusion, and
making a decision that, all things considered, is inappropriate for the
release team - alone, at this time, with the non-specific discussion we've
had so far about this issue - to make.

I don't have an immediate idea about how to fix this. Simply noting that
this is the release team's suggestion, and that it is not a final decision
would be a good start. Unfortunately, it already appears as if this is a
final decision, and we will have to deal with some, if not all the fallout.
Crucially, this was sent without a huge amount of thought as to messaging,
so that also complicates things (Elijah, I know you spent quite a bit of
time trying to communicate this well, but your audience was the community
alone, not the entire audience of people who will consume this message; if
we were taking thing half as seriously as it will be taken beyond our own
little world, we should be more careful about saying what we mean and why).

I guess I'll reply when I've spent more time thinking about how to fix it.

(I think the decisions regarding all the other modules, including Tomboy,
were great. Very sane and sensible.)

- Jeff

-- 
linux.conf.au 2007: Sydney, Australia           http://lca2007.linux.org.au/
 
     "Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark
                             Helmet, Spaceballs