On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Brandon Low wrote:
The only justification for this steering board is that it will help to prevent "patch rot" on the tracker. I see absolutely no way that this can be a good thing.
I (obviously) disagree with this. I also have no particular plans to discuss this at length now when we're already in the voting period (and while I'm actually on vacation!) and I hope that all doubters on this concept will just sit tight, observe how things go and instead bring all their opinions in the summer-time 2009 when it is time to evaluate how Rockbox functioned the first RSB-year.
But I still want to just mention these few things about what I think RSB can be good for:
First, I don't think that's the "only justification" for RSB and in fact I don't think bitrotting in itself is the problem we need to adress. The bitrot is a sympthom of a problem. RSB is a suggested attempt to improve things.
- The fact is that Rockbox is growing with many new targets every year, so what worked fine two three years ago may not at all apply as nicely today simply because of the scale of things. I also think that for the first couple of years of early Rockbox history, Björn nursed the project in pretty much the same way I would like the RSB to do. RSB is the (almost) democratic Björn replacement. - There's nobody saying that we will change how things are done in the way technical merit is what is the primary currency here: actually doing things is what counts, not just talking. As it always has been. - RSB has no other powers to control anything but the plain respect by the community that the members have earned. RSB must work in the greater Rockbox interest or it will lose its "power" and purpose and it won't function. Thus there should be little risk that it will damage things much even if things don't work out to work as fine as we'd hope. Remember that we are voting and putting some of our most trusted and experienced Rockbox hackers in the board. Why would they do anything to damage the project? - Many (most?) open source projects are run with a single person or a core group that has the final "pointing hand" in arguments. This is not really much different from that. - Today, I think various developers have various ideas that are then passed upon other various developers. Some dogmas and concepts are thought of as "banned" and some are thought of as "encouraged" (and at times they are even expressed). Never are those said to be by Rockbox or for Rockbox since there's nobody that can or may speak for the project so it is all a matter of how loud you can speak on IRC or argue your case over email. RSB can help to sort this out. Concepts or code-styles or whatever can be changed a lot easier when there's a single group holding the wheel than when we're 65 committers all turning our own wheels in various directions at various times. -- / daniel.haxx.se
