Stuart Herbert wrote: > Hi, > > One of the issues that the o.g.o project has brought to a head is the > definition of what is "official" and what is not "official" when it > comes to Gentoo. The term is already being thrown about in the > Project Sunrise thread; I'm sure it'll come up again in future. > > It's an issue I think we should discuss and find an agreement on. > > Personally, I think what makes something official or not is 100% down > to who does it. I think something is official if it is done by the > project (where a project matches the definition in the metastructure > project) responsible for whatever we're applying the label "official" > to, then that's all that matters.
Its a matter of PR in most cases. Infrastructure has been trying hard to make sure any project we host still provides Gentoo with decent PR. Its easy for us to say that if its not on Gentoo's servers, then we can't fully support it. Its the whole liability thing. (That's why we moved all the servers in the rsync.g.o rotation into our control). User X sees something on *.gentoo.org and assumes that its being properly taken care of and managed. If its non-*.gentoo.org, then they can be safe to assume its not entirely under the arms of Gentoo. Now, we can have experimental stuff on gentoo infra, but the key thing here is it needs to be properly maintained and managed. Say in the case with sunrise, I think a lot of people are concerned with the people managing that project won't be able to handle all the different types of issues people are worried about. Perhaps its also a trust issue also, I'm not sure. > So (picking something entirely at random for an example), if the Java > project had an overlay somewhere (say, on gentooexperimental.org), > because it's their overlay, the overlay is "official". Doesn't matter > where it is hosted - all that matters is that it is run by the Java > project. Right, and if ge.org gets hacked, its pretty obvious that it wasn't officially part of Gentoo anyways. To me "official" means that we (as a group of developers) agree to support something in some fashion and everyone is held accountable for it since its on Gentoo's central resources. > Equally (because it is the hot topic of the moment), Project Sunrise's > overlay would be "official" because they're a Gentoo project. The way > to stop them being "official" is simply to have the Council pass a > resolution to shut down the project. It would have helped if the project had discussed it on ML's *before* announcing it to the world and then ignoring all discussion about it. I'm pretty sure that the whole attitude they've shown thus far has degraded their trust among developers for the project. The discussion about overlays several months ago specifically was against these types of repos being included, yet it somehow got by? There was trust involved there that if o.g.o became to being, that it would try and keep such repos out. > I think the other side of the term "official" is clarifying the scope > of how far something can be "official". Using the Java project as an > example again (sorry guys :), the Java team can put in place > "official" policies and procedures for what their team does, but that > doesn't make them mandatory for the whole Gentoo project. Other > developers remain free to form competitive projects, and put their own > "official" policies and procedures in place if they wish. The trouble here is, those policies don't probably incur more bug traffic for *everyone*. There's lots of ways of doing this and most people want it done in such a manner to reduce bug traffic, bad PR, and an agreed upon policy. > (I hope I explained that last bit properly. What I'm trying to do is > keep in mind the terms of the metastructure document, which explicitly > allow for two or more teams to be competing with each other). I don't think the real argument is a competing team. If it is, what teams is it? I'm not sure I understand your point here in relation to the current stuff going on. > What are the alternatives? If a project's activities are not > automatically "official", then who gets to decide, and how is that > decision made? How can that decision be made fairly, without > contradicting the metastructure, and without giving rise to any > accusations of 'cabals'? The decision should be made on our development list for the most part. If it seems that most people don't have a problem with it, then it should ok to assume that its 'more' official. Now if its discussed and several people point out issues with a project, and the project either denies or ignores the issues that are brought up, then I would question its official status. We're all peers in the same group and we should all respect each other's opinions. If such a project cannot work with their peers on resolving the issue then it to me the project doesn't belong in Gentoo nor be included as official. -- Lance Albertson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Gentoo Infrastructure | Operations Manager --- GPG Public Key: <http://www.ramereth.net/lance.asc> Key fingerprint: 0423 92F3 544A 1282 5AB1 4D07 416F A15D 27F4 B742 ramereth/irc.freenode.net
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