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Fedora Project Board Meeting (2006-04-18)

Attendance

Present:

  • MaxSpevack
  • ChristopherBlizzard
  • RexDieter
  • PaulWFrields
  • JeremyKatz
  • BillNottingham
  • ElliotLee
  • SethVidal
  • MattDomsch

Not present:

  • RahulSundaram

Notes/Summary

General Business

1. MaxSpevack sent an agenda out for review.

2. SethVidal noted that there are many threads already on the fedora-advisory-board list which may have more relevance elsewhere. The Board agreed that, while f-a-b is the right list for people to use to bring issues to the Board, the appropriate action is to migrate those issues to the appropriate project-specific list after a short addressing period.

3. The "Mystery Board Member" will be revealed as soon as possible -- still undergoing approval process from his company. UPDATE: moot point, MattDomsch is the man.

Packaging

As we were getting ready for fc5 release, the idea of package reviews in Core was adopted, using the Extras review process and guidelines. We need reviews spread out among more contributors. Reactions: guidelines need some clarifications; length of pending period needs shortening.

MaxSpevack wants to ensure communication stays open with Extras for this, and that RH packagers follow the rules to the greatest possible extent. As far as we know, no one in RH has specific package review duties. We need buy-in from RH packagers and their management to make this process work. It would be great if we could automate this into a fedora-rpmlint utility that would minimize human error and time leakage (talk to FESCo about this, esp. Ville). For checks that cannot be automated, possibly make an incentive for people to get them done, e.g. gear.

ACTION ITEMS:

  • SethVidal / RexDieter -- bring fedora-rpmlint idea to Fedora Extras Steering Committee (FESCO).
  • MaxSpevack -- toss incentive idea around Red Hat internally for feedback.
  • Red Hat folks -- work on internal buy-in from engineering and engineering management.

Ambassadors

Main issue right now is budget + other resources. Difficult when Red Hat is the bottleneck. One idea is to create a means for Ambassadors to get all the materials necessary to produce items for shows (CDs/DVDs, shirts, banners, etc.) and allow those items to be sold at a "Fedora MSRP" in order to recoup costs. This could go a long way in having events become self-sustaining.

ACTION ITEMS:

Websites

For bouncer, ElliotLee needs help from a good web-app programmer. If anyone comes across someone skilled, please send them his way. There is a todo list on the Wiki page for Websites. Monitoring and ticketing will be up by the end of April, hopefully.

Governance Policy

The Board requires a governance policy including election, succession, voting registration, and so forth. This policy should NOT revolve around the particular technologies used to enable the process *at this time.* That is a separate discussion to be handled later.

ACTION ITEMS:

  • SethVidal -- will start and moderate this discussion on fedora-advisory-board.

Trademarks & Usage

Fedora trademark usage needs to be resolved for use in numerous projects, so they can move forward. This discussion needs to move to Marketing. Some issues:

  • Will the policy allow people to resell Fedora stuff? Probably, as long as we can make sure the stuff (especially the software) is not associated with Red Hat.
  • Concerns about rebranding by vendors, et al.: Doesn't seem to be any reason vendors couldn't sell preinstalled systems billed as "Fedora," provided the system load is only from the official repositories. Use cases that support preinstallation of official Fedora might include laptop vendors. We wouldn't expect people vending server hardware or other enterprise solutions to do Fedora with no guaranteed support channel.
  • Prevailing wisdom seems to be allowing usage of marks only for work that draws exclusively from official Fedora repositories. What do we do about the rest?

ACTION ITEMS:

  • MaxSpevack -- will begin a discussion on fedora-marketing-list, and interface with legal as needed. (IN PROGRESS)
  • MaxSpevack/ PaulWFrields -- work on collecting up various policy that exists all over the place, cataloging it, clarifiying it, modifying it, and adding to it as needed. Big project. Lots to do here.

Lowering Barriers to Entry

We are still getting complaints about the multiplicity of account system requirements for new contributors. Part of this might be due to the many wiki pages with interlinking checklists. Part might be due to unfamiliarity with GPG and/or SSH keys. We need to make some sort of canon for very high- or top-level documentation that is avoids the "too many links" problem. We could easily populate Plone with this content before it goes live. Docs should be responsible for shepherding the content and making sure all other locations point to the single Best Instruction Sheet.

ACTION ITEMS:

  • PaulWFrields -- bring content issues to Docs project.
  • SethVidal -- bring service issues to Websites project.

Building Fedora in the Future

Internal to Red Hat are a series of meetings between Fedora devel, RHEL devel, and release engineering about the future of how Core/Extras is handled, how we package up the Fedora distribution, how RHEL is built out of Fedora, etc. Need short-term plans (pre RHEL5) and longer term solution (post RHEL5). Start planning now for the things we want to do months down the road.

SCM can and should be looked at, but a change in SCM would be too disruptive to implement until post-RHEL5; we need to start having regular meetings with FESCO on how to handle this.

On a related note, Seth is working on a facility for making on-the-fly distributions.

ACTION ITEMS:

  • MaxSpevack -- drive this initiative inside of Red Hat. Create proposal, get buy-in, perform technical/business cost-benefit analysis, etc. (with help from BillNottingham, ElliotLee, and JeremyKatz).
  • WarrenTogami -- leading SCM investigation from the Red Hat side (with help from Bill and ElliotLee).
  • BillNottingham / ElliotLee -- involve FESCO as appropriate.
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