[ogb-discuss] Power Management Community Proposal

[Simon Phipps]

On May 14, 2008, at 17:22, Stephen Hahn wrote:

> * Randy Fishel <randy.fishel at sun.com> [2008-05-14 21:06]:
>> On Wed, 14 May 2008, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>>> Randy Fishel wrote:
>>>> I would like to propose starting a Power Management Community.
>>>> The intention is to coalesce fragmented power management
>>>> discussion and work into a single community.
>>>>
>>>>  The proposal can be found here:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Power_Management_Community_Group_Proposal_2008
>>>
>>> The OGB discussed this Monday, and had 3 questions before approving:
>>>
>>> 1) Why a community instead of a project?
>>
>> Primarily, because it would never be a single project.  There is a
>> larger desire to coordinate power management work, instead of having
>> bits (possibly conflicting bits) scattered all over the place.  And  
>> it
>> is also difficult for developers/users to know where they should go  
>> to
>> address their specific problems or needs.  The community could well  
>> be
>> considered an umbrella, or meta-project, as one goal is the creation
>> of projects to solve specific needs, but that grouping doesn't exist
>> (yet).
>
>  One of the problems I see with this proposal (and the Emancipation CG
>  proposal, for that matter) is that the larger scale tradeoff
>  discussions aren't going to happen in the proposed CG, but in the CGs
>  that hold the responsibilities for the main source tree for each
>  proposed change.  That is, I'm sure that Power Management  
> participants
>  might all agree that a particular change is great for Power
>  Management, but that a person more interested in performance or
>  availability might disagree.  That discussion happens within ON.
>
>  (A project can have multiple repositories and multiple mailing lists,
>  so I'm not sure why one would need a meta-project or a CG to  
> coordinate
>  multiple efforts.)
>
>  My question for a new CG proposal is always going to be "why does  
> this
>  group of people need distinct representation?"  (And it would be nice
>  to apply this question with "still need" to some of the inactive CGs
>  as well.)  I guess I don't see the need here:  Desktop, Laptop,
>  Appliance, and ON all seem to be CGs providing overlapping
>  representation for this technical area.

If we had such a thing this would form a fine Special Interest Group.  
I'm proposing that we stop using the generic term "community group" on  
its own and start a new approach where we have several kinds of  
"community group" - SIGs, Projects, consolidations/distros and user  
groups. I have a rather verbose proposal ready to add to Bugzilla to  
start the resolution process, I just need to see if I can make it a  
bit more concise first.

S.