Request For Candidates: Application Review Board

[Scott Kitterman]

On Sunday, August 15, 2010 04:44:52 am Matthew East wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 12:48 AM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> 
wrote:
> > On Friday, August 13, 2010 07:29:55 pm William Grant wrote:
> >> On Fri, 2010-08-13 at 16:06 -0700, Rick Spencer wrote:
> >> > Again, I don't recall why backports was ultimately not chosen as the
> >> > repository.
> >> 
> >> Perhaps this should be considered before introducing new archives and
> >> processes that duplicate others that have existed for several years.
> > 
> > It was considered.  We discussed it at UDS and I thought that was the
> > direction this was going to go.  This was not the plan Canonical showed
> > up with at UDS and I would be interested to know why they switched back.
> 
> According to Jono's original post, this process is not a Canonical
> formulated plan at all but has been developed with consultation with
> community contributors and the Technical Board. I can see that it has
> been discussed at this thread [1] and there also seems to have been a
> (private?) meeting about it [2] but it seems to me that the process
> that has been followed hasn't succeeded in getting feedback from
> people with an important opinion about it.
> 
> [1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2010-July/000312.html
> [2] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2010-July/000378.html
> 
> Is there anything that could have been done differently during the
> process which would have allowed these opinions to be taken into
> account before the process got to this stage? (I appreciate that Jono
> has said that the process is a "first cut" but it has at least got to
> the stage of asking for members of a board, and there appear to be
> objections of principle to the basic approach taken.)
> 
> Perhaps the ubuntu-devel list should have been copied into the
> original discussion with the TB, or the process should have come to
> ubuntu-devel beforehand?

I'm not aware of anyone who was engaged in the development of this process who 
is supporting it and does not work for Canonical.  Certainly the preponderance 
of the positive commentary have not come from community developers.  In the 
posts you referenced the only non-Canonical person listed is Iain Lane.  He 
expressed a lot of concerns at UDS (I was in the technical session) and my 
reading of his comments in this thread is that they persist.  Whether it's a 
"Canonical formulated plan" or a "plan formulated by people who all happen to 
work for Canonical" is a distinction without a difference in my opinion.

I missed the initial UDS session on this topic and at the second, techincal 
session confined my input to how we might best accomplish the goals that were 
laid out (because that was the purpose of the session).  As far as I know the 
response to the request for candidates is the first broad based discussion of 
this concept in the Ubuntu development community.  In terms of things that 
could have been done differently, I think this discussion should have happened 
first, not after it's been decided and the work is done.

Scott K