
\summary{2008}{5}{8}

Agenda call: \agoref{gentoo-dev}{bd9a171d7303bf1299a4c307f7b6ddcf}


\agendaitem{New process}

The last few meetings have dragged out for hours unnecessarily. This time, we 
tried moderating the channel during discussion of each topic, then temporarily 
opening the floor for that topic before a vote so anyone could contribute. 
Here's the time breakdown:
\begin{center}
 \begin{tabular}{c|c|c|c}
  start & end & mode & duration \\ \hline
  20:00 & 20:30 & closed & 30min \\
  20:30 & 20:46 & open   & 16min \\
  20:46 & 20:56 & closed & 10min \\
  20:56 & 21:14 & open   & 18min \\
  21:14 & 21:46 & closed & 32min \\
  21:46 & 22:09 & open   & 23min \\
  22:09 & 22:42 & closed & 33min \\
  22:42 &       & \multicolumn{2}{c}{open floor}
 \end{tabular}
\end{center}

Total before open floor: 105 minutes closed, 57 minutes open.

Optimistically, we could have saved an hour if the channel was moderated 
throughout the meeting. That's unlikely to be the case in reality, because we 
would be redirecting people's comments from queries into the channel.

Should we keep it moderated until the final open floor? Should we have 
an open "backchannel"?


\agendaitem{Document of being an active developer}
\index{developer certificate}\index{trustees}\index{project!devrel}

\dev{araujo} made http://dev.gentoo.org/$\sim$araujo/gcert1.pdf in Scribus. 
He'd like to ask for approval of this design and discuss the script, in 
particular its infrastructure requirements.

Suggestions on the certificate content were:
\begin{itemize}
\item Add a title to the top: "Developer Certification"
\item Add devrel contact info (general devrel email address)\footnote{Whether 
trustees or devrel should be the proper contact was a matter of discussion. In 
the end, devrel was seen as responsible for human resources and thereby 
responsible for it.}
\item Add a link to the (devrel-maintained) user information web page
\item Add start and end dates of developer status on the (devrel-maintained) 
retired developers web page
\item Add a sentence saying e.g. "This certifies that XXX was a Gentoo 
developer from START_DATE to TODAY_DATE." 

The point is to avoid implying that the developer is certified forever, or will 
be a developer in the future. This information should be gotten from LDAP, for 
example using python-ldap. One could base this script on devrel's slacker 
script.
\end{itemize}

It is unsure how signatures on the document are going to happen, but one option 
is to keep a GPG-encrypted image of a signature and decrypt it on-demand for 
certificate creation. This should be discussed with the person doing the 
signing.


\agendaitem{Slacker arches}
\index{arches!slacking}

There were no updates on this topic. 


\agendaitem{When are ChangeLog entries required?}
\index{ChangeLog}

This question mainly relates to arch stabilizations.

The consensus was that ChangeLog entries even for arch stabilizations provide 
valuable information that is unique without network access and more accessible 
than CVS logs even with network access. So, ChangeLog entries are always 
required. If you aren't making them now, fix your script to call echangelog.

Some people were curious what proportion of space ChangeLogs take in the tree, 
but most people didn't think that was relevant.

\dev{welp} suggested making a changelog message part of repoman commit.
It would be helpful for the QA team to help with checking for and enforcing 
ChangeLog messages. If that doesn't help matters, the council may have to take 
action.


\agendaitem{Can the council help fewer bugs get ignored by arm/sh/s390 teams?}
\index{arch!arm}\index{arch!sh}\index{arch!s390}\index{arches!slacking}

The work happens, but \dev{leio} says it is not communicated to anyone and has 
no relationship to whether bugs are open. We need to understand the workflow of 
undermanned arch teams and see whether there's anything we can help improve.

Possibly improving recuitment -- we should add a good, motivating 
staffing-needs entry.


\agendaitem{PMS: Are versions allowed to have more than 8 digits?}
\index{versions!number of digits}

References: 
\begin{itemize}
 \item 
 \agoref{gentoo-dev}{db2f5c09c2c0c8b042ca3d0dcec7cdaf}
 \item
 \bug{188449}
\end{itemize}

What do various package managers / tools support? \package{sys-apps/portage}, 
\package{sys-apps/pkgcore}, and \package{sys-apps/paludis} all handle more 
than 8 digits. \package{app-portage/portage-utils} does not but could be fixed 
to use longs instead of ints, with some loss of performance (magnitude unclear).
versionator.eclass \index{eclass!versionator} also needs fixing for >8 digits.
Apparently [ ]-style tests break with large numbers, but [[ ]] works. We have 
to be careful which tests are getting used anywhere large versions are compared.

The council generally favored allowing versions to have $<=18$ digits. This 
allows them to fit into 64 bits (18 signed digits or 19 unsigned) and gives them 
an upper bound, which some implementations of version parsing could find useful.

We voted to do more research and testing, specifically to ask the package 
maintainers with extremely long PVs whether they were needed and to test the 
impact of extending versionator.eclass. The involved packages are:

\begin{itemize}
\item \package{sys-process/fuser-bsd}
\item \package{sys-apps/net-tools}
\item \package{sys-apps/gradm}
\item \package{net-im/ntame}
\item \package{media-video/captury}
\item \package{media-libs/libcaptury}
\item \package{media-libs/capseo}
\item \package{sys-block/btrace}
\item \package{www-apache/mod_depends}
\item \package{net-wireless/rt2500}
\item \package{sys-fs/unionfs}
\end{itemize}


\agendaitem{Enforced retirement}
\index{retirement!enforced}\index{project!devrel}\index{council!appeal process}

The meeting had already gone 2.5 hours and we were short multiple council 
members because of the late hour in their timezone, or broken hardware in the 
case of \dev{jokey}. Because of the urgency of getting this resolved, we 
decided it couldn't wait for next month's meeting and scheduled a special 
session for next week at the same time.

The topics to be covered here were:
\begin{itemize}
 \item 
 What was the council's role in the recent enforced retirement of three 
 developers?
 \item
 Why does the council permit such actions in apparent violation of Gentoo's 
 policy of openness?
 \item 
 What is the council's role in an appeal?
\end{itemize}



\agendaitem{Open floor}
\index{retirement!appeal}

Some people thought that we were going to make a final decision on the above 
appeals today, because the agenda was insufficiently clear on that. That was 
not the case. What we intended to do was explain why we can take the appeal and 
then figure out the process for it because we haven't done any appeals before.
