> Err .... I am perplexed. If I look at 3.8 I find quite a number of 
> fixes and enhancements. Surely, there is some process in place right 
> now, or else how did these changes get in?


I can reply for that part.
Regularly I (and marcus may be) looked at some fixes and pushed them. 
So I consider myself as an harvester.


>
>>> With the guides being fired and all I wonder who is in charge to 
>>> actually accept contributions?
>> Hehe, that is a misleading sentence. First of all, the Guides didn't 
>> do
>> much harvesting at all and the Harvesters as a group was not equal to
>> the guides. Secondly, the issue of stalled harvesting predates the
>> forming of the Coordinator group.
>
> Well, I did see the harvesters being part of the guides setup. At 
> least I don't see anyone calling himself a harvester anymore, nor do I 
> see anyone referring to harvesters any longer. Do I understand 
> correctly that for the current setup the "janitors team" plays the 
> role of the harvesters, or is this incorrect?
>
>> But the important question of course remains, what model/process do we
>> want to have?
>> - I know the Janitors team has been doing some thinking. I would like 
>> to
>> hear more from them in this, because that is after all the team formed
>> in that specific area. Ken?
>
> It would be interesting to hear, yes.
>
>> - The packages Team is meant to produce a partitioning during 3.9 
>> which
>> means we get people assigned to look after portions of the image as
>> packages. This will IMHO greatly improve the situation since all FIXes
>> should be handled in a distributed fashion. Unfortunately it seems 
>> that
>> Team is a bit stalled too, at least when it comes to that specific 
>> task.
>> Avi?
>
> This is basically TFNR under a different name, right? Why will it work 
> better this time compared to when you tried it? If I read the current 
> stall correctly, it's the same problem that TFNR had - lack of 
> maintainers. Any ideas how to address it differently this time?
>
>> - The release team leader should IMHO focus on dealing with ENHs and
>> other planned additions for a release. That doesn't mean the leader 
>> does
>> all the work, but it means that the Team formed for a release takes 
>> the
>> overall decisions and actions regarding ENHs and additions, of course 
>> in
>> synch with the package maintainers mentioned above because they are 
>> the
>> ones in charge of the various packages.
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong but with "TFNR rules" isn't the *maintainer* 
> responsible for integrating enhancements? What has the release team to 
> do with that?
>
>> Now... the above describes a model/process which really doesn't have a
>> dedicated group of harvesters but instead relies on the image being
>> partitioned into packages with maintainers and having dedicated 
>> release
>> teams, and I think that is the direction we should move.
>> What do you all say?
>
> Same thing as last time: Sounds nice if it works ... but ... where are 
> you going to find the maintainers? (and by maintainers I don't mean 
> name tags I mean people actually putting effort into it)
>
> And besides that, given that none of this is in place what happens in 
> the meantime? Nothing?
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
>