Re: [gentoo-dev] Monthly Gentoo Council Reminder for January

[Thierry Carrez]

Lance Albertson wrote:

> Gentoo has been missing some kind of direction/goal for some time now.
> Looking back at the last two years, what are the major
> changes/accomplishments that we have done? Granted, I know there has
> been great strides in improvement in some things, but I really wonder
> about any ground breaking enhancements.
>
> Since the council is the closest representation to a leader we have, I'd
> like to ask if they can come up with some kind of global goals for 2006
> and beyond. [...]

Yes, the Gentoo Council can / should set some global goals for 2006, and
should probably discuss about this in the January meeting so that they
can be set in stone by the February meeting.

That said, we weren't elected as "managers" but as "global visioners",
so we don't really have any power to force people to do some work in an
area in which they don't want to. We can say "it would be good to reach
that" then follow progress using the regular meetings, but we can't make
it happen just by saying it must be done.

One example of such point is the portage signing thing, which the
council already set as a global goal and for which is follows progress
at every meeting, but we can see that doesn't mean a lot of work is
done. We still need a group to coordinate such goals, much like what the
security team does with security bugs (call the right people at the
right time rather than doing any committing work). That's what I called
the "MetaBug taskforce" in various metastructure proposals. If we don't
have people that want to form (and work in) such a group then we can set
as many global goals as we want and follow as much progress as we
want... it won't get us very far.

In brief, we need the team to coordinate such goals, even more than we
need global goals.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (Koon)
Gentoo Linux Security & Gentoo Council Member
-- 
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list