"following lsm meeting [1], various discussion on the cooker list [2] and in order to improve the communication and the organisation of the distribution, a structure to handle the distribution was proposed.
The possible community contributions were separated as follows :
translator, everything that has something to do with translation and i18n.
tester, people running cooker or 2006.0, reporting bugs, providing suggestions and patchs.
packager, people who take care of package, or provides them.
The definition are quite vague because the goal is not to restrict or to isolate, anybody can help where he want, but the vast majority of the work is around these three type of task so we felt it was important to recognize them.
In order to coordinate the work, a steering committee have been named.
His goal is to help to solve problem by discussing and by providing various opinions of people responsible of part of the distribution.
Packager are still free to handle their packages as they want.
For the moment, people in the committee have been named based on their current position, inside Mandriva and inside the community. Unlike the debian technical committee [3], the goal is not to impose technical decisions, but efficiently discuss the issues, technical or not, with the appropriate people.
This is not really a change in the way the distribution is handled, much more a acknowledgement of the current decision process
The committee can be reached at distrib-sc@mandrivalinux.org, the current composition is :
<insert list>