"What is the Fedora Project?"

[Máirín Duffy]

On 10/15/2009 12:18 PM, Seth Vidal wrote:
> And I think the point that Mike and I have been making on this list is
> that given the claimed goals of fedora we shouldn't expect people who
> are not religious about free software and heavily involved to get
> ANYTHING out of fedora.

Sure, and I think you guys have done a good job advocating for that.

What I'm telling you here, though, is that I *am* the target user you're 
advocating for (freetard/zealot, techie, contributor), and at times I'm 
at my wit's end trying to use !rawhide Fedora.

> In short we have a choice:
> 1. change the goals of fedora

> OR
>
> 2. tell people we are intending for a small segment of the over
> population and those folks who are not in that segment and/or are not
> interested in becoming a member of that segment are NOT in the righr place.

I'm trying to point out if our goal was to only reach for 
software-freedom-religious folks who are heavily involved in it, we 
could still do a much better job for *them.*

> my short answer to this is easy:
>
> newest != stable.

Newest - 1 != stable either, since it gets abandoned in 6 months. Older 
than that != stable as well, since it's abandoned. I used to run 
rawhide. I retreated to newest release. Should I now retreat to newest 
release - 1 and update every 6 months to newest release - 1?

If that's the case, totally fine, but I think then we need a little bit 
of rebranding. I don't think people like feeling that they are behind 
the curve, especially if they are your target user of techie! E.g. 
current model:

'Rawhide' = Rawhide = dear lord, no.
'Newest release' = F11 = hope you've got a thick skin.
'Newest release - 1' = F10 = okay, i can handle this.

to this:

'Unstable Development' = Rawhide = dear lord, no. (no releases)
'Stable Development' = F11 = hope you've got a thick skin. (releases)
'Newest Release' = F10 = okay, i can handle that. (releases)

You're not changing anything you're doing then, just renaming things. 
Just an idea; may or may not be the right problem to be solving.

> Think back to RHL days. Remember the 'avoid the .0' strategy that A LOT
> of people adopted?
>
> Every fedora release is more or less a .0. THAT IS BY DESIGN OF OUR GOALS.

There is no x.1 then. There is nothing to use unless you want operating 
your computer to be a Sisyphean running-up-the-escalator-the-wrong-way 
affair. How does my tolerating that benefit Fedora though? There's no 
system for me (or others) to easily allow Fedora to reap any benefit of 
my blood; I just bleed in the corner, in vain. [1]

So, if our target is people who are willing to submit themselves to pain 
for Fedora's benefit, our top priority should be building tools to reap 
the most benefit from their sacrifice [1], making it dead simple to 
identify and report the issue and follow up when the developer needs 
more information to fix the problem.

All in all, it does sound like *I'm* not a target user for Fedora. In 
fact, it sounds like (please please please please correct me if I'm 
wrong) that the Fedora you and Mike are pushing for is not meant to be 
used as a productive desktop by anybody, rather it's meant to be a 
laboratory setting they submit themselves to for the benefit of science 
and progress!

That makes me a sad panda, because I think I'm pretty extreme and even I 
don't hit the mark you've set.

~m

[1] SORRY FOR THE DRAMAS! I have been reading a lot of vampire fiction 
lately. ;)