How to properly communicate on what components versions we will use in a cycle?

[Sebastien Bacher]

Hi everybody,

One of the topics that I've seen coming back a few times in online 
comments is that some people in our community feel like the decisions we 
take are not always communicated as they should and don't always seem 
open to feedback from other teams. Do you have opinions on how we could 
improve that?

There are probably different categories there:

- infrastructure components (toolchain, python version, etc): the 
choices there are usually openly discussed and I've not seen a lot of 
controversies about the process or results

- standalone softwares or components specific to a flavor: the 
discussions around those are happen in the team which has interest for 
the component and that seems fine

- libraries or components used by different flavors and teams: those are 
the one which usually lead to issues and I'm interested to know what we 
could do better there.

Typically the desktop team will have a session at UDS where we settle on 
what version of GNOME will be used (that's probably be fine for the 
desktop team to decide), but also, glib, gtk, the other GNOME libs. We 
don't discuss everything there though and often get things "sorted on 
the way" during the cycle, like we will update poppler or webkit because 
GNOME starts depending on those new version. That "sort of work" and 
other teams usually cope up with the side effects and catch up, but I'm 
wondering if we couldn't handle that better.

I'm going to send emails to ubuntu-devel about the versions of webkit 
and poppler (and maybe some other components as well) the desktop team 
plans to use, I'm interested to know if:
- that list is the right place for those informations and to get 
feedback on the choices we are taking
- those informations are useful for you (do all the derivatives teams 
read the list?)
- we have a standard way to track the choices different teams have taken 
about targetted for the versions (with maybe some reasons on the "why") 
or if we should try to get one?
- what components should be discussed this way (or another)? I guess 
each derivatives has a list of components they depends on and would 
welcome to be informed and able to give their feedback on the choices we 
are doing.

Thanks for reading,
Sebastien Bacher