Fedora 7 Art Plan (was Art Team FC7 Progress So Far - Community Feedback)

[David Zeuthen]

Hi Máirín (and list),

As the person who's responsible for packaging up the artwork into a form
so it can be in a release I thought I'd chime in. I believe I have a bit
to say as I will be working with this community to make Fedora 7 kick
ass art-wise.

As a matter of introduction for the list, I work for Red Hat on the
desktop team and work on integrating the kernel/base system with the
desktop. I also maintain the artwork packages. I've been lurking on this
list since it's inception and following the progress of the community
forming... mostly in my spare time... cuz I and others (like Diana and
Máirín) been busy with other things than Fedora, namely getting RHEL5
out of the door etc. I try to help where I can. Enough about me :-)

On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 23:39 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> > As this seems to be the current Fedora 7 schedule [1].  I'd like for the 
> > graphics to be mostly completed by February 12th, in time for Test2.  
> 
> That's good, since that's the deadline *I* set two weeks ago.

(So.. it's a bit ironic you just said in the other mail just earlier
this evening "this is a community project!" and now refer to a deadline
*you* set... which, AFAICT, is only to "Visually refine the concepts
gathered in round 1. You vote for your favorite(s) with your time and
effort."... which is radically different from what Diana is suggesting.
That's besides the point of my mail then, hence the parenthesis... )

I've been reading the various proposals on the list and I wasn't really
sure exactly what the process was; I think it's great we have community
involvement but a thing like visuals isn't something that is to be voted
on or some of the other suggestions that came up. That worried me a bit.

If you ask me, I think what is needed is an individual, a benevolent
dictator if you like, that sets the direction and facilitates community
contributions. There's an expression along the lines of "too many cooks
ruin the meal" [1] and I think especially for visuals it's very true. If
you look at John's mail I think it echoes this need too... a need for a
project maintainer / coordinator.

To me it's obvious that Diana (for a lot of good reasons including
skills, training and her past track record) is this person, also partly
because she's employed by Red Hat to do exactly this... and hence have
much more time than to do this than anyone else. FWIW, I was happy to
see Diana post a concise plan that made sense to me.

[1] : might translate bad; I'm a foreigner

> > This will give David Zeuthen and others enough time to integrate the 
> > graphics.  "Mostly completed" means that there is: 1) a set look and 2) 
> > coverage of all the pieces indicated on the ReleaseGraphics [3] wiki in 
> > that style.  Of course, minor polish can be accepted until Test3.
> > 
> > So how do we get there?
> > 
> > The FlyingHigh theme [2] proposed by John Baer has the greatest 
> > potential and interest.  Time is short and there is still more 
> > exploration I would like to see within the theme so I'm declaring this 
> > the official theme for Fedora 7. 
> 
> Under what authority?

It seems to me somewhat that you're turning this into a fight over power
and who gets to call the shots. Most projects in our Fedora universe
have maintainers and leaders; why is it any different for artwork and
why should it be a problem?

Thanks,
David


p.s. : somewhat off-topic.. however a bit on-topic for this.. it's
interesting to look at other distributions, for example did you see what
happened to Ubuntu's artwork during their last release?

 http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=16491