[Koha] Proposal to form Koha Technical Committee

[MJ Ray]

Paul Poulain wrote:
> I fully agree with you. And that's why i'm proposing to have another
> structure/team/guy/whatever to work on strategic/long-term things.

Which seems a bit daft to me when it's not clear why/how the current
structure isn't working.  I asked "What is that problem?" in my mail
of Wed Nov 10 07:33:14 NZDT 2010 and no answer to that yet from any of
the tech-ctte advocates... a solution looking for a problem, then?

> To answer MJ question related to that question : I fully agree solR
> won't probably be included in 3.4 (not ready enough,...) But do we want
> it for 3.6 ?

Personally, I don't know yet.  I've asked some questions in the Solr
thread, but there are many many many</Lassard> questions which seemed
unanswered by the announcement and I didn't feel like a discussion was
really wanted.  At the moment, Solr looks like an awful overreaction
based on very few real problems and maybe no insoluable ones, but it's
maybe just that the basis was hidden away inside biblibre instead of
shared with the community as it developed, so I've a bit of catching
up to do.

[...]
> > Historically there have been failures on both parts. Things are
> > looking up, however.
> 
> Agreed. (I'm not trying to say I did everything well. But I try to learn
> from my mistakes, and I just want Koha to be always more and more
> reliable & sustainable & predictible)

OK, so what did you learn from 2.2's release date slip?  Please
share it with the later RMs and help us all.

[...]
> I strongly disagree : it should a community "stable" decision a RM can't
> change just because he want to change it. That's a question of being
> sustainable & predictible (for both vendors and users)

Well, if such a community decision is taken, I think it would be an
unlikely-to-be-appointed RM candidate who didn't respect it.

[...]
> >> Again, I think we are slipping into the commercial vendor mode where
> >> more voices are being added for no purpose other than to make noise.
> >>     
> > I agree with this.
> >   
> Not sure I understand well what's meaning here. (The fact is that many
> new features are developed by sponsored work and commercial vendors, so
> we have to deal with that ! )

Not necessarily.  Globally, we have no obligation to accept every
sponsored POC which vendors offer to the community.  It is in the
vendors' interest to get those things accepted, but it is in the
community's interests only to accept the "right" ones.

[...]
> > The process/workflow is simple:
> >
> > 1. Post your RFC on *both* the wiki and both lists.
> > 2. Bump the post to the lists if you (as the author) feel that there
> > is not enough vetting, etc. going on.
> > 3. If you (as the author) are actively promoting your RFC and it is
> > not getting enough discussion, feel free to complain loudly;
> > otherwise, don't complain.
> 
> Well, that's what I do : I complain loudly ;-)

Yeah.  Still not seen BibLibre actively promoting RFC discussion.
http://lists.koha-community.org/pipermail/koha-devel/2010-November/034557.html
is not a serious discussion-starter.  One short mail for 32 RFCs?
It's barely longer than the mail I sent for my last one RFC
http://lists.katipo.co.nz/public/koha/2010-September/025182.html
and the 32-RFC mail doesn't ask any specific questions.

So to make it blunt what I think Chris N might have been trying to
say subtly: don't complain and try promoting RFC discussion. ;-)

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
Past Koha Release Manager (2.0), LMS programmer, statistician, webmaster.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire for Koha work http://www.software.coop/products/koha