Re: community decision-making & 8.5

On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 07:22:27PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 5:55 PM, Josh Berkus<josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> >> That implies that we need a release manager. Electing one would be the
> >> first step. That's a lot of work and responsibility, with lots of
> >> potential for making people cross, so in practice I think as soon as
> >> someone steps up to the plate and volunteers to do it, he's the one.
> >
> > Having recently been immersed in the issues of the Perl 5 community, I'm
> > going to disagree and say that having a singular release manager would
> > be a bad idea.  While an autocrat is a more rapid decision-maker, he or
> > she can also be a bottleneck ... and frequently is.
> >
> > I do think that we (core) should show more leadership in enforcing the
> > deadlines that the hackers have already agreed on.
>
> I was going to say that I'm perfectly fine with having an all-powerful
> release manager, as long as it's me.

Seeing your performance and involvement in the project so far, I
would be ready to agree with you here ;)

> I don't really think we need to invest that much authority in
> one person, however - and certainly not without more of a
> clearly-defined mandate for exactly what that person is
> supposed to do with that authority. What I really think we
> need is, as you say, more leadership in enforcing the
> agreed-upon deadlines, and along with that, more leadership in
> setting the deadlines (and other parameters) in the first
> place. However, I'm not sure that that group should be
> coterminous with core. For example, this is something that I'm
> pretty interested in helping with, and I am obviously not a
> core team member. However, I'm not asking for an exception
> just for me: I think that generally it's in the best interest
> of the project to recruit MORE people to help with this work,
> and if we say that it is the responsibility of core, then we're
> confining it to a group of seven people of whom only five are
> regularly active on -hackers. And several of those people are
> committers who I would guess are somewhat overworked already.

I agree, I see no reason for core being the one group to enforce
deadlines. Put together a release team and have it take care of
enforcing deadlines (ruthlessly if need be).

Kristian.

--
Kristian Larsson KLL-RIPE
+46 704 264511 kll(at)spritelink(dot)net