Stepping back

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 15 May 2018 at 06:43, Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
> On 05/14/18 12:58 PM, Keith Packard wrote:
>> Adam Jackson <ajax at nwnk.net> writes:
>>> tl;dr: I will not be release manager for 1.21, nor for anything
>>> thereafter either, and this time that's probably permanent.
>>
>> I'd like to thank you for all of the work you have done and with you all
>> the best in your next adventures.
>
> +1

+lots

Really appreciate the effort you made to herd everything into place
and go well out of your way to land everything.

>>> As for what this means for tree management and future release plans,
>>> well, I can't answer that, that's sort of the point. There's a
>>> community discussion that needs to happen there, and my opinions can't
>>> dominate that if I'm serious about stepping back.
>>
>> We can start discussions now, and I think we should plan on holding a
>> discussion about this during XDC in September.
>
> While in person discussions can be efficient, I do wonder if limiting
> them to people who can travel to XDC is how we end up burning out the
> same folks over and over.
>
> I don't have great answers as more of us step back like I did a few
> years back and Adam is doing now, but with few new folks coming into
> our maintainer fold in the past decade, we need to figure out how to
> both get more contributors and how to grow them into maintainers.

We've been facing the same question in Wayland. Here's what I wrote up
about what I think we should do with that:
  https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2018-May/038100.html

Personally I think having longer discussions and write-ups in
bugs/issues would make the development a lot more accessible. The list
is great and it does serve its purpose, but it throws up a barrier to
entry: you have to be subscribed to the list and get all the mail, to
participate in discussion. (And that's before you get to the barrier
to entry of git-send-email etc.)

I don't really have enough of a stake to make suggestions for X
development, but that might at least be a good starting point for
spreading the load a bit.

> While Wayland is certainly making great strides, I don't think the world
> is yet ready to stop using X altogether, but it's getting harder and
> harder for us to keep X alive.

Ah yes, the year of Wayland on the desktop. ;)

Cheers,
Daniel