Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Grant Goodyear <g2boojum@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev] seeds, GLEPs, and projects
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 17:59:49
Message-Id: 20060921175501.GI25921@feynman.corp.halliburton.com
1 For whatever it's worth, I rather like the Gentoo Seeds project,
2 although I'm more interested in nice tools to make the seeds, than
3 in having pre-existing seeds.
4
5 Ciaranm has argued that the project really should have been GLEPped.
6 Although I wouldn't have opposed such a GLEP, it's not clear to me that
7 a GLEP is the right format here. Underlying a GLEP is the notion that
8 somebody is going to have to approve it. By our current policies,
9 anybody is welcome to start a new project (we welcome innovation, after
10 all), and if the effort underway doesn't involve other projects then the
11 only approval needed would be the project leader, which would be the
12 person who created the project, which would seem a bit silly.
13 Of course, nothing would stop somebody from posting an RFC to -dev
14 essentially in the same format as a GLEP, however.
15
16 Of course, what ciaranm and others are really suggesting is that before
17 there's an announcement that Gentoo has an official project to do blah,
18 it might be nice to get some feedback from the community first. If we
19 (being Gentoo) say that we're going to do something, and then things
20 fall through, it might make us look bad, after all. In this case,
21 though, it's not clear to me what stuart should have done differently.
22 He didn't issue a press release (unless I'm missing something), he sent
23 an e-mail to -dev announcing that he had created a new project and
24 described the purpose of that project. If it had been me, I probably
25 would have sent an e-mail letting people know that I was seriously
26 thinking about creating such a project, pointed out that it was
27 experimental, and given people a (brief!) period of time to complain
28 before went ahead and pushed the button, but it's not clear to me that
29 any of that was actually required. (I would like to suggest that it is
30 more courteous, though, not to surprise our devs w/ something new if a
31 more gentle introduction can be managed.)
32
33 To some extent, we're back to determining what the word "official" means
34 in these cases. My goal in making projects easy to create was to
35 support innovative ideas. Most innovative ideas don't pan out, however,
36 so a corollary has to be that just because a project exists (and thus is
37 somehow "official") doesn't mean that anything useful will come out of
38 it, nor that what does come out of it will be supported by the community
39 as a whole. If we need to change things to make that reality more clear, I'm
40 certainly willing to listen to suggestions.
41
42 -g2boojum-
43 --
44 Grant Goodyear
45 Gentoo Developer
46 g2boojum@g.o
47 http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
48 GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] seeds, GLEPs, and projects Simon Stelling <blubb@g.o>
Re: [gentoo-dev] seeds, GLEPs, and projects Lance Albertson <ramereth@g.o>