Suggestions for improvement of the emulator

[Robert Lunnon]

On Thursday 08 September 2005 10:11, Francois Gouget wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Sep 2005, Robert Lunnon wrote:
> [...]
>
> > The issue isn't about Alexandre, it's about a governance model that
> > revolves around the opinion of a single person and whether the difficulty
> > of having a patch moved forward is inhibiting the take up of developers.
>
> I think this governance model can work as long as the 'gardian' of the
> source has the required competence, experience and vision.
>
> And I think Alexandre has all these qualities. Despite you saying this
> is not about Alexandre you must be of a differing opinion since you are
> not happy with the current situation as your arguments about the
> 'Solaris core functionality patches' show.

No, I'm not, but I respect his right under the prevailing governance to refuse 
them even though I don't buy in to his decision, just as Alexandre has to 
accept that I have little intention of changing them to suit him. One day 
when I have a week or so free, I might, you never know.

> But an hypothetical committee aproach won't help an hypothetical set of
> patches get through unless a solid majority of the committee is in favor
> of that set of patches.
>
>
> [...]
>

This isn't the point either, if you have a commitee structure or multiple 
maintainers then you almost must have a process for establishing architecture 
and for submission assessment which is objective otherwise you can't get 
consistent approach to architecture. As we have seen different people put the 
attributes I listed in different orders, personally for example I'd commit a 
functionality patch that wasn't portable (Properly #ifdefed for the platform 
and with a fixme for others) to promote emulation of that function on others.

Now I'm not saying here that Alexandre isn't objective, just that his criteria 
of assessment is not clear to me, and after 2 years doing this I still reckon 
I have about a 50/50 chance of having anything major accepted. If it's not 
clear to me, then it must be positively opaque to someone new. You might say 
that the project is open, but the governance is closed in that the developer 
and user communities have little influence over governance.

I see this as a bad thing.

To get some feel for what I'm suggesting have a look at the OpenSolaris  
model. Direction is set by a Community Advisory Board, soon to be replaced by 
a Governance Board which comprises both Sun and community representatives. 
OpenSolaris is struggling with some of the development model issues now but 
are proposing escalation procedures for developer disputes to the 
Architecture review boards. Though summary (no-escalation) models are also 
being proposed, I don't personally favour them because they don't give 
developers the confort that they've had a fair hearing or  that the "majority 
has spoken"

See here for more detail on decisions, it's not perfect but not too bad

.http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=1344&tstart=15


Anyway, I've said enough, my opinions on governance are pretty clear

Bob