Re: Discussing issues

[Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 12:58:30PM -0400, David Dawes wrote:
> What I don't understand is why this extra stuff, that sits above
> XFree86, needs to get pushed down into XFree86.  I guess there will
> always be some disagreement about where infrastructure ends and
> the "extra stuff" begins, but XFree86 has basically followed the
> traditional "X is mechanism not policy" approach.

Note that when I say "umbrella" I mean a set of mailing lists and
other kinds of server, and people that talk to each other.  I don't
mean a release.

Again the example that "GNOME" as most people think of the software is
only a minority subset of "GNOME" the umbrella.

I'd even advocate shrinking the XFree86 main distribution release.
 
> >Let me be crystal clear: this is NOT a favorable outcome while I'm
> >wearing any of my hats, from Red Hat to freedesktop.org to just plain
> >old Havoc.
> 
> And neither is any outcome that disenfranchises those XFree86
> developers with the most time and effort invested in XFree86 itself.
> 

Great, so let's design a third outcome.

Strawman proposal: we create a fairly open infrastructure/process
(quite a few people with commit access to *their own module* and the
web site for their own module, ability to create mailing lists of
their choice for their module, ability to create bugzilla components
for their module). This infrastructure hosts N modules, some of which
are currently under XFree86. Anybody who touches stuff outside of
their module without asking gets publicly flamed/warned zero-to-N
times and then loses commit access for N to infinite months.
Depending on flagrancy of the action.

Module maintainers are dictators for their module. However, some
subsets of module maintainers work together to build releases.  For
example, the driver maintainers might get together and build a driver
release. The people working on XFree86 might get together and build a
traditionally-scoped X distribution. These releases are done with the
buy-in of the maintainers who retain control of their own modules.

Releases are "governed" in whatever way the module maintainers
involved in that release want to govern them. So for example if 
the current XFree86 core team wants to release the modules that they
own, then they would be the sole government of that release.

The initial list of module maintainers would be the people currently
recognized as maintainers of each area. If someone wants to change
something in ways the maintainer doesn't like, they have to create
their own module to play in, or ask maintainer permission to create a
branch.

For blessing/standardizing/coordinating/whatever new features, the
first guideline is simply that if you want something to be part of X,
it should be hosted in this infrastructure. So the STSF guys would
have seen fontconfig land in CVS as soon as it got off the ground, and
vice versa.

The "blessing" of something like STSF or fontconfig would happen by
those modules being included in multi-module releases. As long as they
aren't in a release, they would not be blessed in any way, and
regardless of release inclusion both would be allowed to use the
hosting infrastructure.

To initially populate the infrastructure, we'd import XFree86,
freedesktop.org, STSF, and other interesting projects.  The barrier to
entry for importing new projects would be low but nonzero; it would
just have to seem to belong to the X umbrella more than any other
umbrella.

Havoc

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