[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Tobias Scherbaum]

Ned Ludd wrote:
> The devs have a voice one time of the year: when it comes time to vote.
> But what about the rest of the year? What happens when the person you
> voted for sucks? You are mostly powerless to do anything other than be
> really vocal in what seems like a never ending battle. That needs to
> change. I'm not quite sure how. But I'd like to see the dev body have a
> year-round voice in the council. Either via quick votes year-round
> on topics or simply by having discussion in the channel. Devs should have
> a right to voice their concerns to the council and engage in interactive
> conversations without being labeled troll.

I'm not sure about that, but we can easily give it a try.

What I'd like to see for sure is a formal rule on who can decide to
modify or change parts of glep 39. As it's the council's constitution
somehow, we have two options from my pov (besides that a former council
did decide the council itself can change it's rules):
- a large majority (at least 5 out of 7) of council members needs to ack
the change
- changes to glep 39 require a vote with all developers participating
and a large majority (2/3 or 3/4) needs to ack the suggested change

Also I'd like to require commit messages to gleps (and especially glep
39) being useful and denote based on which decision by whom that change
got made. For example the following commit message I'd consider quite
useless (at least two or three years ago):

"Add the one person one vote clause to GLEP 39 as agreed." [1]

Who did agree? Where is that noted down? ... and so on.

> An EAPI review committee could work well also. As long as we could get
> non bias people in there.

I was thinking about that for quite some time and as long as we get some
non-biased people in there we should try that as well.

> The council should be more about community vs technical issues only.
> We have lots of top level projects within Gentoo which have simply given
> up on the council as being an outlet to accomplish anything useful.
> It should be our job to look at the projects in Gentoo. Look at the ones
> that have a healthy community and encourage and promote them in ways.

ack

> For example prefix comes to mind. It was a project I did not like at
> first. I'm not even a user. And there are things I surely don't like
> about it as is. But there is community support and it's the icing on the
> cake for some. So I'll back the fsck up and give credit where it's due.
> This is a perfectly good example of a project/fork that needs to come
> back home. Perhaps it's time to cherry pick some more stuff/people out
> of Sunrise?

prefix is a really good example, yeah. Nearly noone knows it, but it's
really cool to have for example a virtualized windows machine running on
a linux host. The windows box then runs prefix in interix. Not that it's
really useful at all (hey, it's slow as hell) - but it's very
interesting that such things are possible and it's definitively an
eyecatcher on expos. prefix is one of Gentoo's most underrated projects.

As for Sunrise I do think that's what we already do - but: getting users
more actively involved in Sunrise makes them happy, plus it's easier for
us to recruit new developers. Therefore: push Sunrise! I very much
disliked how the Sunrise project has been started some years ago, but in
the end we do need to integrate it a tad better to make it even more
useful for both users and developers.

> desultory points out any two council members can decide to approve anything,
> and that decision is considered to be equivalent to a full council vote
> until the next meeting. I vaguely recall that rule. I'm not sure about you,
> but I think that is a little to much power to put in the hands of a few.
> Any dev mind if we dump that power?

It's quite much power in quite a few hands, but in the end that's some
kind of "last resort rule". All council members should be smart enough
(and i do consider all of us being smart enough) to know when that "last
resort" becomes active. Therefore I think it doesn't hurt to have such a
rule in place. 

> Meetings will likely go back to one time per month and be +m with +v be
> handed out per request with open chat pre/post meetings.  The reason for
> this is to keep the meetings on-track. I won't engage in endless
> discussions. Facts can be presented. They will be reviewed on merit,
> technical and social.
>
> The reason the meetings should go back to monthly is to allow those who
> are council members in Gentoo to accomplish things other than the
> council only. We all have personal lives and we all have our respective
> roles we play outside of the council. Another note on meetings. The time
> they are held currently don't fit well with my work schedule.

I'm all for going back to monthly meetings and make them a tad more
organized. As I summarized in the last few minutes of our last council
meeting - we do have rules in place to keep our meetings organized, we
just need to follow them. 

As for meeting times we can (that was mentioned somewhere?) move to 21
or 22 utc - if we're going to monthly meetings and restrict meetings to
say 60 or 90 minutes. If we have an agenda sent out a week ago everyone
should be able to be well prepared for the meeting so a restriction on
length of meetings wouldn't hurt.

If council@g.o is updated we can quickly vote on meeting times.

> Thank you all and I will try not to let you down. Unless you were one of
> the ones who wanted to me lose. Then sorry, but I'm going to have fun
> disappointing you, by doing what is best for Gentoo.

And that's basically our job: taking care of Gentoo.

> So lets have some damn fun again !@#$

yay!

- Tobias


[1]
http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo/xml/htdocs/proj/en/glep/glep-0039.txt?r1=1.1&r2=1.2