0.0 Draft of EPEL Charter

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



========
 Vision
========

Visions are for people who stand on mountains. System administrators
and operators are people just trying to get stuff done and have the
pager not go off one night.

=========
 Mission
=========

To build and maintain a curated set of packages built from Fedora
releases that help system administrators get their jobs done on Red
Hat Enterprise
Server and related operating systems.

=========
 History
=========

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is technically a downstream of the Fedora
Project. Various RHEL releases have been based off either Red Hat
Linux or Fedora releases.

  * RHEL 2.1 == Red Hat Linux 7.2
  * RHEL 3   == Red Hat Linux 9/Fedora Core 1
  * RHEL 4   == Fedora Core 3
  * RHEL 5   == Fedora Linux 6
  * RHEL 6   == Fedora Linux 12/13
  * RHEL 7   == Fedora Linux 18/19

RHEL releases are not the entirety of any Fedora release, but a subset
that Red Hat feels best meets the needs of their customers while being
long term maintainable by Red Hat. This means that many packages that
a customer might need was never included and that customer would need
to search for a package somewhere else.

Early on, many of these packages were maintained by various Forges and
developers who would put these packages up on websites for others to
use as they needed. Sometimes these packages would conflict with
either RHEL packages or each other. Othertimes the packages would get
updated rapidly to meet the developers needs but not other
users. Various people felt that maybe it would be better to build
packages from Fedora into an Extras repository that could be used by
people.

Initially there was some consensus of packagers joining together, but
eventually disagreements emerged on various packaging philosophies
which caused EPEL to go one way and others to join at organizations
like RPMforge.

==================
 Initial Policies
==================

The initial packaging philosophy has been that EPEL will never replace
a package that is shipped in Red Hat Enterprise Server. The reason for
this limitation was that this was the only release that the builders
had access to, so other RHEL releases (desktop, etc) could not be
easily checked if there was a conflict.

Secondly, updates were to try and not break things. The idea was that
system administrators should not need to manually update or change
anything to make a process work again after an 'yum update'. [This
policy is no longer valid as the philosophy of various software
upstreams has become much less open to automated updates]


===================
 Organization Rules
====================

Steering Committee
==================

The EPEL Steering Committee (EPSCO) is made up of interested members
of the various Red Hat Enterprise Linux rebuild communities.  As of
2017-03, the membership consists of 2 members from CentOS, 2 members
from Fedora and 1 member who sits in both.

* Stephen Smoogen (smooge)
* Kevin Fenzi     (nirik)
* Brian Stinson   (bstinson)
* Jim Perrin      (Evolution)
* Anssi Johansson (avij)

EPEL and the EPEL Steering Committee are chartered by the Fedora
Council. The Fedora Council can override any decision made by EPSCO.
The size of the EPSCO committee is set by the committee but can be
increased or decreased by the Fedora Council.

Each member of EPSCO will confirm their continued membership on the
committee once a year.  If a member leaves, then the remaining members
should canvas for a replacement and at the next general meeting hold a
general nomination and in meeting "election" of any candidates. If
there are multiple candidates or other complications, an election
using the Fedora voting system will be held.

A committee member can be removed by a super plurality vote of the
other Steering Committee Members. [For the current committee size that
would be 4/5ths.]

Responsibilities
================
EPSCO is charged with meeting regularly to go over current problems
and concerns of the EPEL community. It will create policies governing
what releases EPEL will build for, what packages may be in the
repository, testing and packaging requirements and all other policies
needed for the well being of the EPEL community.


Meetings
========
* EPSCO will hold meetings no less than once a month in
  #fedora-meeting on Wednesdays at 1800 UTC. This time will not change
  with various country daylight savings.
* A quorum of members is 4/5ths of the committee members.
* An agenda for each meeting should be published 12 hours before the
  meeting.
* If there is no agenda or not a quorum for meeting, then the meeting
  will have only one item which is "select items for the next meetings
  agenda". This will be emailed to the list and requests for
* If a voting member can not attend, they can ask for a vote to be
  retaken either by email or the next meeting.
* After meetings, meeting minutes will be posted to the Fedora meeting
  list. They should be also posted by the chair to the epel-devel
  mailing list.

Making Decisions
================
In general, decisions by EPSCO should be done by consensus. [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making#Objectives ] In the
case, where there is a disagreement by members, a simple majority vote
of the committee will decide the matter.

==================
 General Policies
==================
1. Package Inclusion
2. Package Exclusion
3. Package Removal
4. Package General Updates
5. Package Incompatible Updates
6. Packaging Rules
  a. RHEL6
  b. RHEL7


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
_______________________________________________
epel-devel mailing list -- epel-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe send an email to epel-devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




[Index of Archives]     [Fedora Announce]     [Fedora News]     [Fedora Cloud]     [Fedora Advisory Board]     [Fedora Education]     [Fedora Security]     [Fedora Scitech]     [Fedora Robotics]     [Fedora Maintainers]     [Fedora Infrastructure]     [Fedora Websites]     [Anaconda Devel]     [Fedora Devel Java]     [Fedora Legacy]     [Fedora Desktop]     [Fedora Fonts]     [ATA RAID]     [Fedora Marketing]     [Fedora Management Tools]     [Fedora Mentors]     [Fedora Package Announce]     [SSH]     [Fedora Package Review]     [Fedora R Devel]     [Fedora PHP Devel]     [Kickstart]     [Fedora Music]     [Fedora Packaging]     [Centos]     [Fedora SELinux]     [Fedora Legal]     [Fedora Kernel]     [Fedora QA]     [Fedora Triage]     [Fedora OCaml]     [Coolkey]     [Virtualization Tools]     [ET Management Tools]     [Yum Users]     [Tux]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux Apps]     [Gnome Users]     [KDE Users]     [Fedora Tools]     [Fedora Art]     [Fedora Docs]     [Maemo Users]     [Asterisk PBX]     [Fedora Sparc]     [Fedora Universal Network Connector]     [Fedora ARM]

  Powered by Linux