Joerg Schilling wrote:
> John Plocher <John.Plocher at Sun.COM> wrote:
>
>
>> Joerg Schilling wrote:
>>
>>> An ARC needs to work in a way that makes it accepted by all communities.
>>>
>> If the ARC was made up of core contributers from each of code producing
>> communities (or consolidations or ...), such that the ARC was a
>> common gathering place for the intersection of these cross-community
>> issues, then the ARC would be the place to work out any differences.
>> This leads directly to ARC decisions that are respected and honored by
>> all, because the decisions were made by all.
>>
>> If you instead balkanize things by saying sub-communities can selectively
>> veto ARC decisions if they don't like them or add constraints without
>> associated participation and negotiation, the process quickly becomes
>> meaningless.
>>
>
> I don't like that a few unrelated people may harm other peoples projects.
>
> Any ARC only gets my approval in case it does not allow a few people to
> dominate others. This is unfortunately currently the case, as there is no
> way to veto against decisions that harm OpenSolaris in favor of sub-projects.
>
I think, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that you're not quite
understanding, or conflating who the "minority" is.
The ARC is a representative board, and is supposed to represent folks
from a broad diversity of engineering backgrounds... it is made up of
folks who are tasked to look at the broad picture without any particular
favoritism towards one project or any other.
Individually, or acting in concern, the small body of ARC members (as
few as 4, I believe, makes a quorum) can choose to derail or reject a
project (though in principle rejections rarely happen, and are usually
accompanied by quite a lot of justification in e-mail and opinions as to
why a project is rejected. From a pure numbers standpoint the project
team may have a "majority" in that it is made of 10-20 people or more.
Certainly larger than the current ARC membership.
But as a representative board, ARC is intended to represent a *much*
larger majority -- i.e. all of the folks who are concerned with Solaris
engineering. So, if you consider them as individuals acting in
collusion, they are a minority. But that isn't the way the ARC is
supposed to act.
In any case, I believe the historical events which you base your
opinions on may actually have consisted of project teams that were
*clearly* in the minority (one or two members), even compared against
just the ARC membership, rather than the ARC *representative weight*.
Perhaps you feel that that there should be an appeals process whereby a
project could appeal a decision to the larger engineering membership at
large. I'm not sure how such an appeals would work. But you could
draft something up as a strawman if that is what you want,. and present
it to OGB or one of the impacted communities for a formal vote.
If you don't like the way the ARC decisions have been going, then I
strongly urge you to become more proactive and attend ARC meetings, and
even sign up as an Intern. Right now from ARCs perspective (speaking on
my own opinion here), I think you appear to be just a disgruntled
project member/leader, throwing stones at the process just because it
didn't give the answers that you wanted it to give you. Sorry Joerg,
that's not how the process works. Sometimes individual projects are
going to lose out in the bigger picture, and that is true in *any*
software project made of people who are not universally in constant
agreement (i.e. any project with more than one person.)
If I've misunderstood, and you have some rationale reason for wanting to
revamp or disband ARC, then I would encourage you to approach both the
OGB and the communities (ON is the right one for most of what you want,
I think) with a concrete proposal for consideration. Right now throwing
stones is just not productive, and, IMO, just serves to further alienate
people who might otherwise be sympathetic to your concerns.
-- Garrett
