Hi,
No other reactions? I know that procedural topics aren't particularly
exciting, but we'd probably welcome a bit more support from the
community (at least the part reading those emails) before formally
bootstrapping the PSC.
Best regards,
Even
Le 27/02/2024 à 16:07, Even Rouault via Tiff a écrit :
Dear libtiff community,
The libtiff project has run for many years without a formal governing
body, and while it has worked well for most of the time, when
difficult non-consensual decisions have to be made, it has showed its
limits. Recently this was the case for the removal in the default
build of the retired TIFF command line utilities. Hence with a group
of other stakeholders including me, Su Laus, Bob Friesenhahn, Leonard
Rosenthol, Roger Leigh, Olivier Paquet and Timothy Lyanguzov, we are
proposing to form a Project Steering Committee (PSC) for libtiff, with
us as the initial members of the PSC. That committee would have voting
powers to make decisions on behalf of the project. This is a structure
that is heavily used in most of the projects affiliated with the Open
Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) in the geospatial field where I'm
involved. A rather successful model for the working and scope of such
a committee is for example the one used by the GDAL
(https://gdal.org/development/rfc/rfc1_pmc.html) and MapServer
(https://mapserver.org/development/rfc/ms-rfc-23.html) projects since 2007
Those rules have served well those projects in the last 17 years, and
can handle situations where PSC members become inactive without
formally resigning (the PSC can of course also decide to formally
remove members that no longer participate). So we are considering
taking strong inspiration from them for the working of the libtiff PSC
. In the adaptations that have been discussed between us, the 2
business day minimum delay indicated for formal votes is probably too
short given libtiff usual pace and could be extended to 5. For GDAL
and MapServer, we also traditionally put adoption of release
candidates as final approved releases to a PSC vote. It could be
discussed if we'd want to do that for libtiff too. For the concrete
mode of operation, typically in GDAL, when a formal decision has to be
made, there is a first round of emails "Call for discussion: topic
XXXX", and once the discussion seems to have come to a conclusion
there's a "Motion: decision XXXX" where PSC members cast their +1, +0,
0, -0, -1 votes.
One advantage of the PSC is that difficult decisions are made on
behalf on the group, which avoids them to be borne by individuals.
Having a PSC doesn't obviously exclude trying to reach consensus among
the broader community. Not everything needs to be formally discussed
and voted. Normal bug-fixing or "small" new features can be dealt in
merge requests as usual, and don't require email traffic. But removing
tools or functionality, break of backward compatibility, or
significant addition of new functionality are topics for discussion
and formal votes.
So, this email is to gather feedback from the libtiff community at
large to check if the idea of a PSC, and its proposed initial
membership, makes sense. If people would like to be included to the
initial PSC, they can (possibly privately) reach to us, so we can
discuss this possibility.
Best regards,
--
http://www.spatialys.com
My software is free, but my time generally not.
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--
http://www.spatialys.com
My software is free, but my time generally not.
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