openSUSE board meeting minutes January 31

Hey all,

Here are the minutes for the January 31 meeting.

These can also be viewed here:
https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:Board_meeting_2022-01-31

= Minutes of openSUSE Board meeting 2022-01-31 =

Board: Gerald, Axel, Gertjan, Neal, Syds
Absent: Atilla, Maurizio
Guests: Bill, Doug, Emily, Luna, Max, Lubos

== Topic: openSUSE Membership ==

Bill: Suggests the Board asks for the state of membership
applications/processing on a regular occurrence. It would add some
more accountability for such a core function.
Gerald: What would be a reasonable cadence?
Neal: Quarterly?
Bill: Seems reasonable, we should also report around election time
too, since that's when most applications happen anyway.
Emily: Would like to join the membership officials too. Bill seems to
be doing everything and she's like to help out.
Axel: Don't think the board can do this.
Neal: It's actually one of the few things we can directly do.
Gerald: Points out Wolfgang and others do plenty too. We shouldn't use
this power to randomly add more people because it's not terribly
polite.
There's a lot of discussion about the particulars between Gerald and Bill.
Emily: They seem to be full of people that do lots of things right
now, and don't focus much on membership.
Gerald: Historically the team was quite large and we were told even
members of the team didn't precisely know who was on it, and some were
missing in action. Plus they did not have ownership of their own
mailing list or Wiki page, which has been/is being addressed now. The
ones that were primarily processing things (Wolfgang and Dominique)
are also very busy processing things around the last election. Bill
was a good addition and perhaps adding Emily will help too.
Bill: He proposed to the team to meet monthly, they didn't receive the
idea well.
Neal: Regular meetings are a rather new thing for teams, it's not a
cultural norm yet. Hopefully it will be eventually.

== Topic: Communication Platform Moderation ==

Gertjan: Atilla, Maurizio, and him have started figuring out all the
platforms and made the first steps toward getting a central moderation
group set up (mailing list, etc.). Reaching out to Jim from the
forums, waiting for a response.
Bill: Discovered there's already a moderator list that Sasi Olin owns,
they'll be modifying that.

== Topic: AlmaLinux sponsorship ==

Doug: AlmaLinux reached out again to sponsor.
The Board generally seems fine about it. Would like to know what they
want out of it though, since it's a bit odd.

== Topic: openSUSE Leap 15.4 ==

Axel: Wants opinion on new release, thinks we'll shoot ourselves in
the foot on default Python (3.6).
Neal: This is a consequence of the Leap platform being based on SLE.
We do have alternate interpreters that we can build community packages
on top of. Python 3.6 is also the default in RHEL 8 and between Fedora
EPEL and openSUSE community, we could probably continue supporting
stuff on it by sharing effort. But we can also build modules in
Backports against newer interpreters.
Lubos: SUSE ships 3.6 as default for stable. And 3.9 as an alternate
interpreter with no packages built against it.
Neal: Points out that Tumbleweed is failing here, where 3.8 is still
the default and neither 3.9 nor 3.10 never made it. We should sort
that out first before tackling Leap. Newer stuff has to land in
Factory first.
Gerald: Leap (or SLE) are always about compromises. In software every
(major) update fares a good chance of breaking something - and be it
an unwarranted assumption It's difficult to handle this kind of stuff.
If the community wants something like the classic (open)SUSE Linux
releases branched from Tumbleweed, the community needs to take that
on.
Lubos: Our build system capacity for s390x is close to our limits,
duplicating distro would push us past our limits.
Neal: For the Python issue, we can just set up community support for them.

== Topic: openSUSE Leap Micro 5.1 ==

Lubos: openSUSE meets Cardano (Leap Micro 5.1)
* Requests board review: https://code.opensuse.org/leap/features/issue/59


-- 
Neal Gompa (ID: Pharaoh_Atem)