Dear list, I asked[1] that we document our decision about Thunderbird, and this led to a Discourse post[2] aimed at our community to explain what we decided and why.
In the TB meeting of 26 January[3], we talked at some length on what we'd like to do in general, and I took the action to put together a proposal. Here it is. # What we'd like to improve 1. The Ubuntu support community sometimes finds itself in the dark when some changes start affecting users. 2. Although logs and mailing list archives exist, there is no clearly identifible record of decisions that have been made by the Technical Board. # Proposal When we make a significant decision, we document a summary somewhere public. It should: 1. Be reasonably self-contained, so that readers don't have to read through discussions to be able to understand the conclusion. 2. Be directly linkable. When it's a TB decision, we will additionally link to it from an index that we will maintain somewhere. For other Ubuntu developer teams, I'd like to simply encourage that they do the same. We will lead by example. I should note that some teams have already been doing this, and I think communication about things so far in 2021 has been a great start compared to how we did last year. I'd like more of the same! # Out of Scope We did discuss at length where we might document things, where we'd link to things from, what process to follow, what to recommend, and so forth. I expect there will also be a question on what "significant" means in my proposal above. I suggest that for now we leave all of that open. It'd be an improvement just to consistently have the above, and we can start to recommend things by example as good patterns emerge. For the TB, we can just do what we did with Thunderbird: decide when something is significant and request documentation on individual occasions as we feel appropriate. # Examples https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/thunderbird-lts-update/20819 Here we used the form "Decision, Rationale, Known Downsides, Available Workarounds" which I think works well to address the community should they wonder what happened and why. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/psa-20-04-2-install-failure-bug-images-soon-to-be-recreated/20846 Not exactly a "decision", but this is exactly the sort of thing I think is really useful for the community. Thanks Laney! https://ubuntu.com/blog/private-home-directories-for-ubuntu-21-04 On switching to private home directories by default. Thanks Alex! [1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2021-January/002531.html [2] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/thunderbird-lts-update/20819 [3] https://new.ubottu.com/meetingology/logs/ubuntu-meeting/2021/ubuntu-meeting.2021-01-26-19.59.html
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