On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 10:36:14AM -0400, Jesse Keating wrote: > On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 14:22 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > > There was some weird politics from the Fedora board who had a secret > > meeting (no records) without telling the MinGW SIG before nor > > informing anyone after. I only found out about the secret meeting a > > week later quite by chance. As a result I got a bit hacked off about > > the whole thing. > > Ahem. Nice try, but keep the straw men to yourself. > > Fedora Board meetings, with the exception of the public IRC meetings, > are always "private". This is due to discussion of a multitude of > sensitive topics, often legal in nature, but sometimes political as > well. These meetings happen weekly, and summaries are posted to the > public (screened for sensitive material of course). They can also be > found on our wiki page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/Meetings > > Also, if you'll /read/ the summary, > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/Meetings/2008-07-15#Mingw you'll > find that the board was mostly supportive of your efforts, and asked > FESCo to handle the technical details and implementation. > > Often times the topics the board chooses to discuss come up only at the > meeting, where there isn't really an opportunity to broadcast the fact. > Many times when this happens, it is noted that we should have a subject > matter expert join the meeting, or we'll table the item until such time > that said subject matter expert can be made available. > > Nothing nefarious to see here, please move along. I'm reminded of a passage from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which seems pertinent: "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'." The fact that the Board has meetings in private and publishes minutes somewhere on the net _does not_ exclude them from being courteous to the people they are discussing. And at the very least _inform them directly of decisions that were made_, and _make detailed reasoning available to them_ so they can understand why those decisions were made. I think this decision was misinformed. But maybe it isn't misinformed - no idea, because there is no IRC log of the meeting[1]. Wikipedia tells me that: "A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position" This is not my misrepresentation of your position. It is how I, in particular, and others in the MinGW team felt after finding out accidentally that the meeting had happened. Anyhow, enough of this. Apparently I am to apologise for misrepresenting the Board, so please accept my apology. I will have a look at the MinGW packages when I have time, and/or when someone sends some patches to fix the remaining technical issues. Rich. [1] Apparently it was held by phone, but I'm not sure of that. -- Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat http://et.redhat.com/~rjones Read my OCaml programming blog: http://camltastic.blogspot.com/ Fedora now supports 60 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#) http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
