[directory-discuss] Anti-features going forward

[Donald Robertson]

Thank you to everyone who has participated in this discussion so far.
And thank you in particular to David for setting up pages, including the
draft section for anti-features.

But I think we should take a step back from working on this project and
let what we've done so far settle for a bit, so we can look at it from a
fresh perspective in a few months time.

The Directory is a resource for hundreds of thousands of people, and we
want to focus our efforts on providing the best resource possible for
all those users. While there are over 15,000 entries on the Directory,
much more free software remains unlisted, and many of those 15,000
entries are woefully out of date. We should focus on making the
Directory more comprehensive and up to date before getting too deep on
features that are more about adding evaluations to the entries that are
already there. We want to make sure the Directory serves users well, and
that does  include considering ideas for evaluating programs beyond the
fact that they meet the Directory's minimum standards. But our current
priority is pulling in the basic facts about all the programs out there
that meet those standards.

So we should refocus on the things that the Directory really needs work
on right now, such as the unapproved pages backlog
<https://directory.fsf.org/wiki?title=Special:ApprovedRevs&show=unapproved>
or the entries that haven't been updated in many years
<https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:Participate/oldies>.

We also want it to be a quality tool for maintainers of packages.
They're not going to find it a very useful tool if they are getting
blind-sided with warning messages on their entries, particularly if they
are just popping up and disappearing without warning.

For some projects there are means for resolving the issues we may have
with them. If a problem is big enough to warn users about, then it is
worthwhile to try and correct it where we can. In particular, GNU
project packages all have means for fixing any particular issue that
might exist in the project, and we should go through those processes to
correct any problem should it exist. There shouldn't be anything in a
GNU project package that we would need to warn users about, so if there
is a problem we must fix it.

In terms of anti-features going forward, we can keep the discussion
going here on the mailing list, in IRC, and on talk pages, but let's not
add any new properties/categories, and remove any that were recently
added. We can circle back around to updating things once this has had
time to mature, and we've gotten through some of the backlog of work
needed on the Directory.
-- 
Donald R. Robertson, III, J.D.
Licensing & Compliance Manager
Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor
Boston, MA 02110
Phone +1-617-542-5942
Fax +1-617-542-2652 ex. 56