[fab] looking at our surrent state a bit

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Fri Nov 3 18:32:13 UTC 2006


Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> The plan was to meet all two weeks IIRC. I think that should suffice if
> it would be held in.

It has been. It was not during FC6 release time because people in the 
board were involved in it. Thats all.

> 
>>  What 
>> does getting more involved into decisions and more presence involve? 
> 
> Comment/Issue a statement on the Legacy problem that was discussed on
> LWN. 

It was discussed in detail that evolved into a discussion about funds. 
The details would be made public when things evolve further.

> 
> Where is the agenda for the next meeting? Or a schedule similar to the
> one FESCo has ( http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/Schedule ) so
> people interested in the work can look at the current status?

I will set that up.

> 
> Further take a look at
> http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/Meetings
> {{{
> Upcoming meetings:
>  * October 3 (10:00 AM EDT, 2:00 PM GMT)
>  * October 17 (5:00 PM EDT, 9:00 PM GMT)
> }}}
> 
> Great work! (Sorry, but what shall I say)

This was the original plans and it has been postponed due to release 
work as stated already. I prefer that interval to stay as it is rather 
than complete wipe it out.

> 
> "Participating in a meeting" and "looking at the results" are two
> different things.

You can discuss the results in the list. I dont see any functional 
difference. I prefer the list before it makes it easier for a wider 
community to respond without sitting on the channel at the same time.

> 
> Normally they are quiet most of the time. But they raise their voice if
> they think that's needed or if it's an area where they are working. That
> works quite well.

I read FESCo meeting mins everytime and I dont see many non FESCo 
members actively participating or commenting in between meetings.
> 
> Well, why meet then in any case? Because it does not work. So we meet on
> IRC.

The meeting is for FESCo members. If non FESCo members start actively 
participating and expressing their opinions on the channels then it 
would become tiresome pretty soon. If you want to hear opinions of the 
larger community its better to do that on the list instead of in between 
the meeting which can be done in this list for the board meetings.

> But why should we lock the community out there? That would be stupid.

That is exactly how FESCo meetings were held before. This doesnt lock 
out community if the meetings results are published regularly and can be 
dicussed in the lists.

> Sure, there may be discussions that need to be held in private, but that
> doesn't happen that often (and if, on the private fesco-list).

If we force ourselves to have public discussions everytime, we wont be 
able to discuss things freely effectively. Some things are better off 
discuss between people offlist or in a private list or meeting. Board 
discussions are usually of this nature and I believe many people prefer 
talking on phone to IRC.   tend to identify nicknames in IRC better than 
voices on phone and I am much better on email personally though.


> Well, contributing to core is still hard afaics.

You can very easily send patches and participate in anaconda-list if you 
have any interest in contributing. This is not a reason why people are 
not contributing. The only thing limited currently is packaging.

> 
> Well, we're getting rhetorical here. For me it looks like that: Red Hat
> failed to get the community involved properly/to build one up and thus
> contributors wandered of elsewhere. Those stupid contributors like me
> that work for Fedora in their free time are busy with a lot of stuff
> already and don't have time to work on more stuff.

I guess we could speculate on the reasons but active development didnt 
happen. A good way to actual fix things would be get involved. Live CD 
is very much a priority for us in the current development release cycle. 
If this involves getting someone in Red Hat to do that everytime, that 
might slow down progress.

> 
>>> Not sure, I'm not a marketing guy. But we need to communicate better
>>> that we're nearly as free as Debian (here and there we are worse, in
>>> other areas we are better afaics). Most people don't know that afaics.
>> Where are we worse?
> 
> Well, some people might say that as we ship firmware packages in our kernel.

So does Debian.

> 
> Take Gnome 2.12 as example: I'm sure many Red Hat developers worked
> quite hard on it and got some quite nice improvements into it. But we
> never shipped it in Fedora Core. Ubuntu and Suse did and took the glory
> for it.

I would prefer we discuss things on the terms of Fedora rather go into a 
competitive comparison. Yes, sometimes GNOME or Firefox or Xorg or KDE 
would do a release in the middle of Fedora development which we wont be 
able to accommodate. People would have to wait for the next release if 
they want that. We might skip releases and pick the next one. When 
upstream projects work in a distributed fashion, it is inevitable that 
some project or the other wont be coordinated with Fedora. This is not 
news.

> 
> We should give users a chance to run their hardware they buy (even if
> that hardare was brought to the market after FCx) -- and the drivers for
> that sometimes require newer X.org releases, while the next FC with that
> new X.org version might still be far away. So what do you suggest to
> those users? Run Windows? Run Rawhide?

Wait for the next release. We wont be pushing everything as updates. We 
need to maintain quality for the release and updates. Major updates of a 
new release of GNOME have higher chances of regressions when pushed out 
as updates.
> 
>>> Sure. That's not what I proposed. But if there are important things
>>> missing (FF 2.0 in FC6; AIGLX in FC5, Gnome Update in FC4) then try to
>>> get a solution that makes installing those software possible easily (the
>>> AIGLX on FC5 was more a disaster because it was poorly maintained).
>> AIGLX on FC5 was not installed by default. It was a *experimental* 
>> separate repository that users had to go and install by themselves.
> 
> And that did not work often as updates from core confused it multiple times.

Sure. There is a reason it is called experimental. If it worked 
reasonably well, it would have been part of the release instead of a add 
on repository.

>> [ripping firefox aside, see mails to jesse]
>>
>> Major updates of GNOME post release as updates falls into the same "too 
>> risky" category as Xorg updates for me.
> 
> Agreed. But I think FC4 should have get one, or FC5 should have shipped
> way earlier.

If a major release of Xorg follows 3 months after GNOME with a Fedora 
release somewhere in between we wouldnt be able to accomodate all these 
in the same release and not within updates either. They would have wait 
for the next release.

> Ignoring the opinion from the community won't help building a community
> around Fedora.

We are trying to solve the bigger problem instead.

>> This is very broad generalization.
> 
> I think that's how it looks often from the outside. Remembers Fedora
> Extras? It took quite some time after the fedora.us/Red Hat Linux
> Project merger until it took of (one and a half year iirc).

Yes and that got fixed only because some people in the community decided 
to act on it and do something about it themselves. Thats what we need 
more of.

Rahul




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