On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, Paul W. Frields wrote:
For most packages this is probably fine but for things like the
desktop (and user experience in general) it's a little different.
FWIW, I personally don't think any of these are good answers. Often I
think it would be useful if we had a good dictator to tell us what to
do (in the Linus is the dictator of the kernel way).
Who exactly do you believe should be that dictator?
Possible answers (though not necessarily an exhaustive list):
(1) Desktop SIG, which jrb and any number of the folks who work for jrb
are free to participate in. Most SIGs have someone who is looked to as
the leader, and part of that leadership is to make the tough decision.
(2) From the Red Hat side, jrb is the manager of the desktop team, and
while I have not idea how he runs his team, I would think that if you
need a dictatorial-type of decision to be made, you could always just
ask your boss to make it.
(3) Ultimately for anything involving Fedora, it is in the job
description of the Fedora Project Leader to be the benevolent dictator.
This responsibility is delegated down to the Fedora Board (and in the
cases relevant to this list) also to the Desktop SIG and Artwork Team.
But none of that changes the fact that *Red Hat* pays the Fedora Project
Leader to be the benevolent dictator for anything that carries the
Fedora brand.
(4) Package maintainers, as already stated, who can choose to default to
upstream if they so desire.
The key to successfully managing the many parallel and overlapping
threads of Fedora is not to have DEMOCRACY -- with a few exceptions, I
generally agree with davidz's general theme of "voting on stuff isn't
the right way to make a decision" -- but to have a decision-making
process and chain of command identified so that decisions ultimately do
get made.
Then if a certain person dislikes a decision, they should know (a) WHY
that decision was made, and (b) WHO made that decision.
Bonus points for the decision makers stating their rationale in public,
and for having open discussions leading up to the decision, depending on
how important or complicated the decision is.
--Max
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