Target market?

[seth vidal]

On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 00:06 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Luis Villa (luis at tieguy.org) said: 
> >> but you haven't been talking about that - you've been talking about spit
> >> and polish which sounds more like integration -
> >> choose-your-own-adventure and integration seem fairly antithetical
> >> unless you have N teams for each adventure type doing the integration.
> >
> > Not necessarily antithetical. After all, anyone who uses the thing as
> > a base for their distro is going to want the base to be solid and
> > well-integrated. Taking that route probably would mean that desktop
> > polish is a lower priority than polishing the tools for making
> > derivatives, though.
> 
> Sure, but right now the base is GNOME, KDE, XFCE, development, eclipse,
> etc., plus a server core. That's a *lot* of polish to be doing, unless
> you shrink the base. Also, it's entirely possible that you're polishing
> in different ways if you're doing the choose-your-own-adventure core
> (do you want firefox? epiphany+webkit? konq on GNOME?) vs a tightly
> coupled desktop. See the recent OnlyShowIn thread for examples.
> 
> I suspect this is the path of least resistance, though - we're already
> doing it in one way or another now, and it doesn't require Fedora to
> scare up more resources.
> 
> That being said, it's unlikely this is the way to drastic world
> domination, or attacking other operating system's buzz factor - after
> all, what end user wants to *build their own OS*? They just want
> something that works that lets them do what they want.
> 

I'll suggest a path of pain here but I'll mention it anyway.

This is why we need to be able  to do branches of packages in more than
just 'release' ways.

Arguably fedora gnome desktop would be:

fedora base repo
fedora desktop repo
fedora gnome repo
+
kickstart.cfg to combine them

fedora base repo is an obvious set
fedora desktop repo is pkgrel+1 with fixes for desktop that are desktop
specific
fedora gnome repo is gnome-specific fixes in pkgrel+1

it's an infinite branch set - but then if we spin from there then test1
is:
base repo works

test2 is:
base repo + additional repos work

test3 is:
 spit polish, confirm

final for fedora base
final for fedora gnome desktop


does this make updates an absolute BITCH? yes, yes it does. b/c it means
the maintainer of, firefox, for example might have to maintain different
branches for fedora and fedora-gnome-desktop.

world-of-unfun but for integration purposes may be the only option.

-sv