This just in from opensuse-factory@opensuse.org
Hey Hackers,
For the future of openSUSE development we want to change some things.
Currently, we have some policies around the distribution that date
back to the time when there was no openSUSE. Code contributions are only
possible if you go through a Novell developer. The same thing is true if
you want to make some technical decision.
On the other hand it’s really easy to pass contributions to the Novell
Developers. A simple “osc sr” and you have the change you want in the
openSUSE distribution. But we want to go further now and make it as
easy as possible for everybody to leave a footprint in, and become
responsible for, the openSUSE distribution.
To make this transition easy going for everybody we came up with the
following plan:
We want to split up Factory into smaller parts and join together devel
projects of packages into topic projects in the Build Service. So for
instance we want to have a GNOME:Factory project with all GNOME and
related packages and Kernel:Head project with all the packages that
belong to the kernel. To no one’s surprise there are already a lot of
teams that handle their packages in this way. For instance the GNOME and
the Kernel Teams 
What we want now is to use this model for every
aspect of the distribution, not only the big parts where this comes
naturally. All current maintainers are working at the moment on an
initial setup for these groups. You can see it evolving live in this
svn repo:
henne-6f900df20eaf3d879d36ea8a00da5012 - Revision 37: /
This is of course not the only possible way to sort packages and in fact
we are only trying to come up with a good starting point. We will always
allow moving of packages, creation of new topic groups, or removal of
obsolete ones. We also use currently an Novell internal database called
the Package Database (PDB). It holds a lot of RPM metadata, for instance
the description, the license, URL and so on but also data that does not
end up in the specfile like the devel project and things like that. We
have started to migrate this data to the OBS and to provide means of
changing it.
Those are the “technical” changes we are about to do for Factory. The
other change we want to introduce is a policy change. As our goal is to
make it possible for everybody to work on the distribution we will
simply allow the topic groups to organize themselves. We think that
there is not the one and only way such a group of maintainers can work
together, but it depends on the involved people and also on the topic
what the best way is. So to transition we will throw together the people
that are currently maintainer of packages and help them work out how to
best collaborate with each other and new people.
This is what we will do. I also have this summarized in the following
Roadmap:
2009.06.03 - 2009.06.15
- Create HOWTO for packagers with the most used osc commands, persons
to contact, documentation and so on. -> Portal/Maintainers - Current maintainers sort through the packages in the topic groups
2009.06.10
- have drop submitreq done
- have clone submitreq done
- have change devel project submitreq done
2009.06.15
- Create missing buildservice projects
- Set devel project for the packages in Factory
- Turn of PDB syncing for Factory
- Start working with the TOPIC groups
2009.06.15 - future
- Fix “bugs” in the new way of working (AI: everybody)
- finish pdb migration (AI: henne/adrian/jw/rudi)
- open up maintenance process (AI: henne/dirk)
- open up check in/review process (AI: henne, autobuild team)
- open up other teams/tasks/processes that support the distribution
(AI: henne)
I hope you support us in this ongoing move and bear with us as we change
the way we work on this distribution for the last God knows how many
years! 
Henne
–
Henne Vogelsang, openSUSE.
Everybody has a plan, until they get hit.
- Mike Tyson
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org