On Wed, 04 Aug 2004 07:00:26 -0400, Michael Tiemann <tiemann@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Therefore, I plan to specifically update the Governance document, and > also try to handle the "non-free" stuff better, perhaps doing so the way > that Debian does in their social contract. The non-free issues are going to be a blocker for many of the possible community initiative efforts that would want to be recognizes as a Fedora Collection. So even if Fedora comes up with a well thought out and easily digestable policy about non-free packages, it might discourage people on the fringe from contributing inside the fedora umbrella. good luck with that. The other issue from the community side is how strictly Fedora Collections are expected to use only packages from Core+Extras instead of Alternatives. For example, openmosix patched kernel that fit a niche livecd collection. I'm not sure how much interest there is in a communtiy collections that must meet the strictest requirements on non-free and non-alternatives. Not that policy in these areas must bend to popular or vocal opinion, but i would be concerned about going through the trouble of setting up policy around the Collections idea that was unworkable in practise becuase the restrictions on which packages to use is too narrow to fit the situations that community are interested in building a collection for. >From the development process side. I think any non-livecd collection maintainers will have to commit to tracking the Core timescale. Testing of the collections that are going to consume both core and extras packages needs to sync with the changes in the devel tree. You might even have to have a go/no-go review policy about specific alternative collections if they fail to keep up with the development cycle to prevent 'sending out a half-backed' collection. I fear that if there 5 or 6 collections to keep up with, the Board will be under continual pressure from several collection committees to slip development cycle timescales, especially collections that use very niche extra packages that get kicked in the head during major development upheaval that don't ncessarily get a lot of use. I invision situations where the Fedora PVR collection might not pass its review for a release synced with FC6 release and thus Fedora PVR would just not have a release during that development cycle. Or a more realistic example.... any Fedora collection that would attempt to include a version of wine. -jef
