Fedora Board meeting, 2007-01-16, 10AM EST

[Christopher Blizzard]

Elliot Lee wrote:
> Fedora Extras amazes me with how much stuff I find already packaged in 
> it. For Extras, I think we may overestimate the value of package quality 
> and underestimate the value of just having a ton of up-to-date packages, 
> but things are definitely going in the right direction.

Yeah, it's huge.  (Quantity, not quality?)  But it's important to be 
able to say that we have high quality packages, too.  If nothing else, 
but for marketing reasons.

> The biggest headache for me recently has seemed to be hardware support. 
> So far, to get my new storage server working half-decently, I've had to 
> recompile an lm_sensors chip driver with an experimental patch, and 
> download an experimental network driver that works very poorly. I think 
> in the past I underestimated the amount of pain people go through 
> getting their hardware to work. I wonder if there is interest in 
> creating a "Fedora Kernel" sub-project or something, to do things like:
>     - package up 3rd party drivers
>     - improve direct communications with driver developers
>     - create a distributed hardware test grid (participants would 
> download a nightly LiveCD image, boot it on a system with questionable 
> or untested hardware to automatically run a test suite, and report the 
> results back)

Yep.  I've basically been pushing for two big things:

1. Awesome hardware reporting.  Including statistics on suspend/resume 
rates.  I attended mjg59's talk today about supporting suspend + resume. 
  It was pretty eye opening and I think there are some interesting 
things we could do there.

2. Doing something interesting with how we submit patches, share 
information and generate packages.  Use cases would be "I have the 
kernel with this patch and I need to know if it works for other people 
as well."  So with one click they could generate an rpm for others and 
let them know they exist.  Same with watching: that I could watch what 
davej is doing and try out his code very easily.

Those are the two things that help move the needle, imho.

>     - and help with the hardware reporting tool that Fedora 
> Infrastructure keeps talking about. (On the other hand, it was so cool 
> to plug in a UPS via USB and see the power applet magically show up on 
> the GNOME panel.)

Yeah, it's great, isn't it?  I think DavidZ got a free UPS out of that 
deal. :)

> 
> The new updates applet & pup are killer, especially having update info 
> in the pup list.
> 
> In other words, there's still plenty of value to be added by perfecting 
> the basic user experience as opposed to branching out in huge new 
> directions.
> 

Yep, but doesn't mean we shouldn't be investing in the big stuff down 
the road.

--Chris