[fab] looking at our surrent state a bit

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Bill Nottingham schrieb:
> Thorsten Leemhuis (fedora at leemhuis.info) said: 
>> == Fedora Project Board ==
>>  * it's not that much present -- we know it exists, but that's often all.
>>  * seems to meet quite seldom and it's hard to see what it does or if
>> there even is progress somewhere
> Well, we have public minutes. What other things do you think the board
> should be doing?

A schedule page in the wiki? That's requested for sub-projects like
Extras iirc, but there is no Schedule for the Board itself (and non for
Core, too).

> Realistically, the board does not have *direct* resources where it
> can by itself implement things other than policy.

Well, it jumped in the Xorg 7.1 for FC5 discussion. I liked that. I
could also ask around now and then "what should the board handle?" And i
could ask the subproject if they need help.

>> quite slow. And not only that, also the infrastructure of Fedora for the
>> community (new VCS, let community help in Core, ...) seems to go forward
>> quite slowly (e.g. nearly nothing).
> We're working on that. FC6 and associated releases got in the way
> of doing much work in this area.

I know, but it still far from perfect.

>>  The Live-CD is a good example for the problems -- how long are we
>> working on it now without a real result? Much to long!
> So, counter-argument here. Most all the work for LiveCDs is being done
> by the non-RH community. If the community has not been able to progress
> this to a 'real result', what is that saying?

IMHO it says that the task was to big for the community . A result might
have long finished if one RH employee would have helped getting the
project started and up to the first real release. Then a community might
exist  by then that can take the project it further.

> I would like to get to
> the point where progress can be made in areas without direct RH involvement.

I'd like to see more us working closely together. Currently Fedora often
still is a bit like Core and Extras -- RH is working here, the community
there, but more side-by-side and not so much together.

>> Readahead improvements like
>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=156442 linger
>> around without much process for ages.  73 of 850 files in readahed.early
>> and 441 of  3757 files in readahead.later don't even exist on FC7.
>> Readahead.later should run as last app in the init process, but doesn't
>> as there are several other initscripts that run at level 99 (some of
>> them are started after readahead later). There was much talk about a new
>> init system but nothing real came out of it (and Ubuntu got all the
>> credits for their upstart in between). Starting some jobs in parallel/or
>> while the log-in screen is shown was in the discussion and even in
>> testing once, but seems to have vanished again (Opensuse does something
>> like that these days iirc). And RHGB still starts once, ends, and a new
>> X is fireed of for the real session :-/. Takes some more time again.
> I should do some comparisons again, but I do believe that FC6 bootup
> is a good 10-20% faster than a similar bootup from FC2/FC3. It's not
> particularly revolutionary, but we do make some progress.

I did not try, but Suse and Ubuntu both seem to start even quicker these
days.

> That being said, there are always more ideas than there is time.

Sure, that's true...

>> content." (quote from http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives ). Well,
>> that's true in some parts of Fedora (nearly always latest KDE, major
>> kernel updates, Gnome Updates to 2.x.0 to 2.x.[0-9], lot's of updates in
>> Extras-Land), but fail in other areas (no gutenprint in FC6 [a lot of
>> printers are not supported due to that], only Firefox 1.5[Ubuntu 6.10
>> shipped two days after FC6 and has Firefox 2.0 and gutenprint] and no
>> sign of a update in Core to FF 2.0,
> How is breaking all the users extensions a *good* thing? FF 2.0 has
> landed in rawhide, and yes, it does browse. But now extensions like
> mugshot or adblock, etc. no longer work.

I'm not saying we need FF 2 as a official update now. Get it out in one
or two months when most extensions are fixed. Or put it in a special
repo (as aiglx in FC5) and maintain it there for those interested.

>> no X.org-Update to 7.1 [even after
>> the proprietary drivers where able to handle it; owners of G965 hardware
>> were left out in the cold without Support in Fedora due to this as the
>> driver for that popular hardware depends on/is shipped in Xorg 7.1],
> They're not left out - it's in Fedora Core 6.

Sure, now there is something. But such Hardware is in the wild since
September already. So there was a one month gap where you had no chance
of running a stable release on your hardware. That's what I dislike (one
month might be okay, but there were situtations in the past where it
were two, three or even more months).

> And the driver *still*
> isn't fully baked (I know, I've got a i965 box on my desk.) 

Was not that bad on my desk... Well, that's not important here

> I'd prefer
> not to give users of a stable release a driver that only starts X correctly
> once or twice per boot.

Sure. But I also prefer to give them drivers if there are some.

>>  * Gnome and Firefox as a lot of users are interested to run the latest
>> version of those packages (sure, that's often stupid, but that's how it is)
> So, it is better to constantly backport features to existing releases
> rather than work on pushing the next release forward? That's the tradeoff
> you're suggesting here.

The question is: where to draw the line. I'd like to see FF 2.0 or X.org
updates in stable release *after * they were tested in devel and *only*
if they seem to work properly and if they are of interest fo lof of uesrs.

>>  * X.org and gutenprint, as hardware support is crucial -- that sucks
>> even more as out hardware support in other areas of Fedora is quite good
>> as kernel and packages like sane get updates to new upstream version
>> regularly
> I call bullshit on this. X.org is always the latest release available
> at the time the distro is frozen, and we've been working hard to get new
> features and better hardware support into it. All the autoconfiguration
> work in FC6? Done by Red Hat, and I do believe available in Fedora Core
> first.

Many thx for that.

>>  Why don't we have a public roadmap? That might give community members
>> at least a chance to get interested in topics and start helping getting
>> them done.
> So, for many cases, it's follow-the-roadmap-for-the-upstream-project.
> We can do better here,

e.g. with a Roadmap for Fedora-Special things -- new init-system, better
RHGB, stuff like that

> but, for example, there's a lot that's just
> 'whatever GNOME ships.'

Sure.

>> == Fedora Extras ==
> ...
>>  * we can't do anything we'd like to do; I hope we can get a bit more
>> support from RH in the future
> Huh?

I got a bit more into detail in my mail to mether.

CU
thl