Minutes of the Technical Board meeting 2013-02-18

[Steve Langasek]

Hi Martin,

Thanks to the TB for their thoughtful consideration of the UbuntuKylin
flavor application.

On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 11:23:44PM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:

>  * System Assistant, Photo Handling: These two are not Chinese specific,
>    but should rather be done in the general Ubuntu context; System
>    Assistant sounds like the old computer-janitor, a potential successor
>    of which should be implemented in software-center proper

While I agree that these are not Chinese-specific and that this is best
implemented as part of Ubuntu directly, and we should encourage and assist
this, that doesn't seem like the kind of detail that the TB needs to be
involved in.  Do you agree that the Kylin team can make their own decisions
about whether and when it's strategic to temporarily diverge from Ubuntu on
some of these points?  I realize that this by itself is not a strong
justification for a different flavor, but it also shouldn't count against
them, right?

>   * The TB recognizes that requiring already existing upload rights is not
>   * something we can enforce in this case, and that developer merits
>   * should be acquired while working on Kylin instead.  This should be
>   * reviewed in six months, until then the Foundations team has agreed to
>   * be formally responsible for the flavour and help out with mentoring,
>   * sponsoring, and release engineering.

So the actual quote during the meeting appears to have been:

 <stgraber> I guess I'll be talking with slangasek on whether he'd be
            happy to be a temporary flavour lead for Kylin (or have
            Foundations do that) until they are familiar enough with
            everything and have upload rights to do all that themselves

As he and I haven't had that conversation yet, I don't think this has
actually been agreed so far. :-)

Can you clarify what it would mean to be "formally responsible" here? 
Speaking for Foundations we are interested in helping the UbuntuKylin team
get up to speed and integrated into the Ubuntu developer community so they
can be self-sustaining.  I'm a bit concerned that Foundations being
"formally responsible" for anything here could get in the way of that goal,
by leading people to have conversations with us that they should instead be
having directly with the UbuntuKylin folks.  I realize there's a
bootstrapping question here, and that it's hard to ramp up a new flavor if
you're not already an Ubuntu developer, and therefore mentorship and support
will be required.  But I'm keen to ensure it's understood that this *is*
support, not leadership - the real leaders of UbuntuKylin are people in
China like Jack, who have a direct understanding of the requirements.

Thanks,
-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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