Hi, On Fri, Dec 20, 2024 at 12:02:23PM +0100, Matthias Riße wrote:
Some things aren't quite clear to me, but also not critical blockers:
Thank you for the thorough reading!
First:
In order to initiate a discussion about a new idea, they should send an email to the [development mailing list](../communication) or submit a patch implementing the idea to the issue tracker (or version-control system if they have commit access).
I see some overlap between initiating a discussion about a new idea on the mailing list, and opening an issue for a new feature on the issue tracker, but without immediately making it a PR (something which isn't mentioned in that excerpt). Is the mailing list then preferred to propose new features, or should the preferred path still be the issue and PR trackers of each repository?
I want to put upfront that I am not confident that we would want to be more specific in the governance docs. Personally, I would want to see the mailing list to become the central communication channel. I believe that it is often non-obvious to new (and even past) contributors, which place would be best to put a feature. Having the discussion on that happen in a central place and be archived should be both educational, and efficient. When we are talking about a new feature for some topical extension package and everything is clear, then a contribution can go there directly, of course. In this case no regulation could improve this, hence we should not regulate. Obviously, if a PR simply pops-up in a repo, nobody would reject it just because a person did not ask for advice before. Maybe others can chime in too, whether we want to encourage prior coordination more strongly.
Second:
The Chair [...] has the casting vote when the project fails to reach consensus.
and:
However, in case of a tie between choices in the outcome of a vote, the external PMC member is asked to select one of these options as the winner.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but to me this sounds like both the chair and the external PMC member are tie-breakers, which obviously wouldn't work if they disagree on how to break the tie. How is that meant to work?
Thanks for catching that! I agree it makes no sense. From my POV it should say: If there is no external PMC member that can function as a tie breaker, the Chair [...] has the casting vote when the project fails to reach consensus. The proposed setup that is subject of this vote has a named external PMC member. Adding this conditional clause would remove the casting vote privilege from the PMC chair -- which would be me, if adopted. I can say that I am OK with this change, and as a proposer of this text, I think we can go ahead and just make the change. Best, Michael -- Michael Hanke GPG: 4096R/C073D2287FFB9E9B http://psychoinformatics.de