[osgeo4w-dev] OSGeo4W Governance

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

I have felt for some time that it would be desirable to somewhat formalize
the governance of OSGeo4W but I have hesitated to bring anything forward in
part because I have scaled back somewhat on my time commitment to OSGeo4W
and thus find it difficult to follow through on significant new initiatives.

However, in light of recent questions, I'd like to bring forward some
preliminary thoughts.

I would like to suggest we have a Project Steering Committee, roughly in
the vein of other OSGeo projects.  The PSC would vote in the usual fashion
on any contentious OSGeo4W issues.   Major new policies, and major transitions
could be written up as RFCs for voting.

I would suggest at least myself, Jeff McKenna, Jürgen Fischer, and Matt Wilkie
as members of the PSC.

Further, I would suggest we have a category of member which is a packager.
Packagers should generally have a good degree of autonomy within the packages
they manage as long as they operate within the guidelines of OSGeo4W.  I
sincerely wish we had a much more rigerous approach to keeping track of
our packages, and who the packagers are for those packages.  We have many
packages in the system without any clear idea of who is responsible for them.

Arguably we could dispense with the distinction and treat the PSC as being
the collection of all packagers.

Thoughts?  Should I try to write up a modest governance RFC?

--

For the most part we haven't had a strong need for voting in the past since
we have pretty much stuck with an existing approach to things.  But I think
we have a few decisions to make reasonably soon to keep OSGeo4W relevant.

I want to roll out GDAL 1.7 as the "standard" GDAL.  This has a distinct
ABI from GDAL 1.5, and this has the potential for significant disruption to
existing packages.   Pulling off a transition could be tricky.

At some point we will also have to change some other fundamental components,
such as the version of Python we deploy.  These are transitions that will be
difficult to manage.  Instead of treating them piecemeal, it might make
sense to have a major "version upgrade" every year or two when we essentially
build all the packages from the ground up.

I'm concerned that many of our packagers are fairly inactive and it may be
difficult to pull such a transition off.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent