I’ve been giving this topic some thought after discussions with John Poelstra. Right now, spin owners create a full feature page, and then run it through the feature process, except that the feature isn’t voted on by FESCo. After the Spins SIG makes sure it’s in proper working order, gets a trademark blessing by the Board, and goes to release engineering for inclusion.
I wonder if we could improve on this process in a few ways:
- A slimmer page for the spin owner, that’s a closer match to the needs of that group as opposed to platform features. What does that page need? I think the Spins SIG probably has the answers, but certainly there are fewer needed for spins than in the case of features.
- A slimmer process, separate from the feature process, so that it’s not confusing for the feature wrangler or people who are perusing our feature pages. This might be even more important if we start trying to manage the Fedora 11 feature process before Fedora 10 GA. (Which I think is a pretty decent idea.)
When we get new trademark guidelines in place, I suspect we’re going to be able to cut out gating on the Board, definitely slimming the process. Until then the Board will do its best to keep up with all pending spin requests at the weekly meetings.
I actually wonder the opposite — I wonder if the barriers to creating a new spin that is targeted for the release (with all of the promotion, build site, hosting, etc to go along with it) should be higher than that required just to get some new software feature into Fedora.
That’s not to say that it might not be better off as _different_ from the feature process, in terms of the questions that get asked and the like. But slimmer I’m not so sure of.