I’m not sure if this can be considered totally ethical, as I’m going to write about the way the council acted up to now, without asking to any other member of the council itself; I still think this is just this way, as it’s only my opinion on how things are going. And I don’t think things are going all too well.
Tomorrow there will be the third council meeting for this second council, of which I’m part thanks to the votes of my fellow developers; I’m honoured of being able to have a place in this representation, but I hoped to be able to do something more than what we achieved in the past three months.
The past two meetings were quite dull, we listened to the status reports of Infrastructure (they’re working on Bugzilla, had coped with a few technical difficulties due to the way both MySQL and Bugzilla work), of QA (he’s working on the documentation… slowly), we decided the scheduled of the meetings (postponed one hour compared to the old council), and we talked about two mail problems brought on by other developers on the mailing list.
Of all these topics, the only things we had anything to decide about, or rather to steer someone into taking care of something, were the two mailing problems one being the presence of SPF records for the gentoo.org domain, and the other being the Reply-To mangling not being enabled in gentoo-core mailing list, both of which also only regard developers and not the users (or rather it could have involved users if we were to decide to disable mangling of Reply-To header for all the lists, but that was an unlikely case).
Anyway, the decisions taken about the two issue were to document a simple procmail rule that was told and explained in gentoo-core multiple time in the Developers Handbook, so that people could just decide to mangle Reply-To for themselves, and to update the documentation about the Gentoo SMTP server, so to tell developers they are invited to use it for Gentoo-related mails (even if they have already an ISP’s server available) and to document the behaviour of SPF, and how to avoid being greylisted because of mails sent with @gentoo.org addresses through MTAs that don’t rewrite as needed the sender address (Gmail for instance is fine, as well as most of the authenticated servers, while ISP servers without any login at all are usually bad at this).
Now, you’d think that in one month time, from one council meeting to the other, there’s plenty of time to write at least some blurbs, that can be translated to GuideXML by almost anyone with a clue about that format… and instead both tasks are currently in a waiting state. Now I understand Brian has a lot of things to do and little time, but he offered and I asked him before if he had time to take care of it or wanted someone else to take care of writing the Reply-To thing (I don’t understand the SPF problems enough to write the documentation about that; although I don’t really care of Reply-To myself, as KMail on that is at least a decent mail client, this thing is something I could write).
I brought a couple extra points to attention for tomorrow’s meeting, I hope I’ll be able to discuss, and as some of them requires people with powers I don’t have to be fixed, I hope I’ll be able to find someone ready to help me on proceeding to enact the decisions we’ll take, whatever they’ll be. But I’m afraid we’re not gonna provide much improvement compared to the previous council if we don’t start to enact things ourselves.
