"official" MOTU projects (was: Morgue for MOTU ?)

[Stephan Hermann]

Hi,

On Thursday 09 February 2006 13:57, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> Stephan Hermann wrote:
> > I want to avoid, that this becomes "an official MOTU project with
> > another wiki page" for the public.
>
> Thats an interesting point of discussion on its own, I think. What is an
> 'official project'? Everything we have a wiki page for? So everyone can
> start/introduce 'official projects'? Do we have a list of 'official
> projects'?

Well, it happend not long ago, that there were "projects and wikipages" just 
showing up, with content that wasn't discussed neither with the MOTU group, 
nor with the people on #ubuntu-motu/-devel or on the ML.
They were just appearing. And we had a lot of discussions about it. Not all of 
us were quite amused and interested in those discussions. 

With all respect, this I'm trying to avoid. Everybody can do what he wants, 
but let us discuss some ideas and projects and stuff like this while we have 
a meeting. So we can decide what we can do and what we don't want. 
Anything else brings chaos. 


> No, I think this reasoning is too black/whited. We are all volunteers,
> and everyone should be able to do what he wants to do (including
> canonical employees, perhaps in their spare time if they are too loaded
> with other work). That's why I don't think we need a list of 'official
> projects' which are sanctioned in any way from a MOTUMeeting or
> TechnicalBoard or whatever. I think the best for MOTUs would be to have
> an agenda and goals we want to acheive, which is intentionally held
> fairly vague.

To be honest, everything what is written on the Ubuntu wiki is well read by 
thousands of people every day. And if something is written there, I see it as
"Oh, they mention MOTU in this text, so it looks like it comes from the MOTU" 
or substitute any other teamname of Ubuntu with "MOTU".


> These thoughts lead directly to the questions "What are we MOTUs, why do
> we work in the MOTU Team, where did we come from, and where do we go
> tomorrow". Strange questions, but necessary, I think.

1. Volunteers who have time and fun to work on OpenSource especially to work 
with teams and don't want to read flames and rants everywhere.

2. Because I wanted give back something to the Ubuntu distribution, because 
Ubuntu gave me a working laptop linux. Thx to Oliver for the hint :)

3. SuSE Slackware -> Delix -> Redhat -> Mandrake -> Debian -> Gentoo -> 
Ubuntu, starting from 1993

4. I don't know what Tomorrow brings and I don't care :)

> > If there is something which is terrible broken with the infrastructure,
> > we should inform via LP the infrastructure people and ask them to fix it.
>
> Right. In general, this works faster than spending ressources on our
> own. In some cases however, we did craft our own tools because someone
> had fun doing it. I think this should be rather encouraged than
> rejected.

Reinhard, the main part of "our tools" is REVU. Which has been approved to be 
"The MOTU Tool and the Siretart/Sistpoty Fame", the rest is some small utils 
which helps our work, and normally everybody has written those stuff by 
himself during his work for different projects. 

And we, or at least those people who were at UBZ, know that REVU is a vital 
part of the "Infrastructure" of Ubuntu Universe. It's not an officially 
supported part, as is Universe/Multiverse, but it's quite famous in this way, 
that REVU2 was officially approved by Mark  
(https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/revu) as SPEC during UBZ. (I'm 
not writing about the rumours of "REVU3" or integration into LP, while we 
were drafting the spec with Kinnison). 

So nobody is stopping anyone from doing something, but actually REVU was 
discussed, approved by all of us and sponsored by Canonical (Tiber) for the 
MOTUs. And as far as I remember, we started to discuss the REVU application 
alltogether. So if somebody wants to write/has written a new infrastructure 
system a la "Morgue"/MOM for Ubuntu Universe, it has to be discussed 
beforehand, because those parts has to be officially supported. (We all read 
the GPL to be precise the "3 years" clause :)) 
Therefore, if someone wants to develop something like this on it's own, please 
do :) But don't mention MOTU/Ubuntu or whatever can link to the project, 
because we are not Canonical, and we can't support those infrastructures and 
actually we shouldn't and don't want that.

Regards,

\sh