Looking back at the last Fedora year (2)

Yesterdays post got some comments, so here is my reply.

Max wrote:

• The Board not being active enough This is 100% my fault, and it is one part of Fedora that I will look back on as the place where I feel like I have personally failed. The Board has tried hard to allow FESCO decision making power, but it hasn't really picked up the ball for being a sponsor for other activities that Fedora so desperately needs.

I don't think it 100% your fault. It just happened that way. When we discussed the government of the merged world we wanted to keep FESCo in control of Fedora (the Linux Distribution, not the Project), because FESCo was well known and accepted among the packaging contributers.

Looking back at that decision now it was correct and wrong at the same time -- yes, having a committee that is completely elected and formed out of those that take care of the bits is good. But FESCo IMHO lost most of the reputation it had in the Extras days. That's happened more by accident and not on purpose -- with the merge FESCo got much more things to take care of, so there simply isn't much time for many of the tasks FESCo handled back in the Extras days. That afaics resulted in a lot of small things here and there that were (or are) not that well, which resulted in a bit of dissatisfaction among the contributers.

• New leaders -- I think we are developing new leaders [...]Compared to the rate at which leaders emerge from other organizations, I think Fedora does fairly well.

Ohh, well, agreed, there are new leaders emerging in Fedora-land -- but afaics all of those you mentioned in your blog or your "lesser known Fedora contributors" series come from other areas of the project, not from the packaging area (which has more the 500 contributers).

IOW: in this most impotent area of out project (where many if not most of our current leaders come from) we're are not doing "fairly well". I'd even say we are doing bad here, as we afaics lost some very active members like jpo over the past year or seem to losing them (mschwendt) -- both of them were members of FESCo and did a lot of good work for Fedora but seem unhappy these days.

JonRob wrote

• [...] you should definitely consider running for one of the boards or try and be a bit more vocal about it and get a real discussion started!

No, with my current job I can not join the Board or FESCo :-/ And I suppose the time for my post wasn't the best, as it will be forgotten after christmas and new year, so I don't think there will be much of a "real discussion".

Andrea Musuruane

• "review queue much to long; I think we need a more wiki-style approach and a easier (more automated) review process". I've been thinking about how to solve or alleviate this for some time. It seems that most packagers are more interested in submitting packages than reviewing. Therefore I came up with two ideas:
  • Have a package review day each 4(?) months. This could be a way to shorten the queue.
  • Force the packager submitter to swap reviews with another packager for each submitted packages.

Well, we tried a "package review day" in the past. It worked, but wasn't a big success iirc. Enforcing swap reviews is something that I've thought about as well. But I think before we enforce them we should strongly encourage them more and help people with swapping; I suppose that might be enough already.