Here are my thoughts on the road map and TC involvement. There is value in two levels of thing:
* Goals that we've committed totrying as a community. For these, RC bugs or NMUing a package are valuable. At this level it's desirable to have review of the plan to achieve a goal. It's frustring to make a bunch of stuff RC buggy only to later realize that even if you had fixed those bugs you never would have gotten to the goal. I think that review needs to be positive--some people need to say yes, not simply no one raises objections. Also, it needs to be reviewed to make sure all the stakeholders are involved. * Second level: wishlist. Things people think would be valuable. Easy to add to. May not represent project-level commitment to try for the goal. You may not want people NMUing at this level. As an example, removing build information from a binary package does sometimes make debugging harder. If we're not actually going to achieve reproducible builds, it's not clear that making those changes is valuable. (In the specific case of reproducible builds, we've met the bar already, but the point stands as a generalization) ---------------------------------------- TC skills that may help here: 1) Across the entire TC we have a moderately good coverage of things in the project. There are probably gaps. Across the TC we have fairly good coverage of who to go to for more depth about a given issue. 2) We're builting a TC that's good at working with people and helping facilitate communication. 3) We can do technical review for completeness of a proposal. ---------------------------------------- One area where I'd like to the see the TC help is to try and avoid late stakeholders appearing. That is, you put together a plan, start working on it, and then discover late in the process that you missed some key player, and they disagree with your goal. So you invest a bunch of time and run up against a stone wall. I think if we worked on it we could be fairly good at making sure people have talked to a lot of the stakeholders they need. I really hope the process supports that sort of review because I believe it could significantly help with burnout avoidance.
