[illumos-Developer] Closed-bin accords of the OpenSolaris conference... / was: Re: illumos_145 i386 build status

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Mon, 2010-08-09 at 15:31 +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> "Garrett D'Amore" <garrett at damore.org> wrote:
> 
> > For the record:
> >
> > There are currently three appointees to the admin-council:
> >
> > 	Simon Phipps
> > 	Anil Gulecha
> > 	Andre Van Eyssen
> >
> > With me that makes four.  I want the existing 4 to select 3 more.  The
> 
> An even number is a problematic decision. It makes standoff situations
> very probable. This is why committees usually have an odd number of members
> and need an odd number of members for a quorum.

Three more are needed to make the number odd.  I am going to avoid
voting in most scenarios and just be a tie breaker.  With the current
situation we don't need a tie breaker.

> 
> Did you ever think about asking the current OGB?
> The OGB has the advantage of being an already elected committee.

Yes, I considered that.  And rejected it.  The OGB is a 100% ineffectual
committee.  I do not believe the problems with Oracle are wholly to
blame here.  I have no desire to repeat the particular governance
mistakes of OpenSolaris.  Again, the idea here is that the board is a
meritocracy, not a popularity contest.

That said, I do at some point want to insert some form of democracy into
the process, but the board needs to figure out how achieve that without
repeating the process.


> 
> > admin council has yet to meet, but it does not have any governance over
> > purely technical matters.  (Going forward, I would like my position as
> > chair of that committee to be one that doesn't actually have a vote
> > except as a tie breaker.  We're not ready for that yet, but hopefully we
> > will get there soon.  And at that time it may be that the council can
> > select a different chair.)
> >
> > The developer council is still being formed.  I've nominated Jim
> > Carlson, although he's not yet pushed anything to the code.  (This comes
> > from his background at Sun previously, actually.)  I've nominated Bryan
> > Cantrill but I'm not sure if I've gotten verification that he'll stand.
> > I have one or two other parties in mind, but mostly I'm waiting to see
> > who actually gets things done.  I'll probably *avoid* naming parties to
> > the developer council initially who do not have a strong track record of
> > consensus building.  (Put another way: I'm looking for people who are
> 
> If you are looking for people to contribute code, you need to give them a 
> chance to do so. From my current information you are currently the only person 
> to do this.

Actually I'm not.  But I'm not going to leave the gate wide open either.

Once I or one of the folks I've entrusted to follow the basic rules (and
they should know who they are) have verified a that a contributor has
code ready to integrate, then we will do so (time permitting).  After
someone has contributed code this way a few times and a level of trust
is achieved, then its likely that they will receive the ability to
commit code directly.

Remember, this project is still *very* young.  Please be patient.

So far I don't think I've received any code that is 100% ready to
integrate yet from anyone else, except for some stuff that seems to be
somewhat contentious (and is therefore not ready to integrate.)

I'm trying to give preference right now to the critical code bits that
help us eliminate critical closed deps.  So I need most urgently sed and
tr.  (Especially tr.)

If Roland can get his ksh93 derived tr ready in a workspace (without any
other changes except adding tr), then I'll probably integrate that this
week.

Likewise, if star is ready to go and doesn't have other contentious
changes, then I'll probably integrate it (although at a lower priority
since it doesn't hit are primary goal of replacing closed bits yet, and
the "pax" debate is still unresolved.)

Hopefully this makes some sense.

	- Garrett