FC3 -> FC4 Upgrade? (was Re: reducing distribution CD count)

[Michael Favia]

seth vidal wrote:

>It does? Who do I represent? I think I am a member of 'the community'?
>I think Jeremy and Bill and Elliot are too.
>I think they're members of the contributing community.
>  
>
Agreed.

>It's not elitistism it's based on listening to the people who are doing
>the work. In large projects if you listen to everyone you can never get
>any work done. So you listen to the people are contributing. I don't
>think that's particularly crazy. Show me an open source project that is
>NOT like that. This is not a democracy - I hope it's a meritocracy - but
>in reality it's something more like 'those people who do the work get
>listened to'-ocracy.
>  
>
I feel this model assumes that maintainership is the only meritorious 
activity in fedora. I think that other meritorious activities such as 
useful analysis of plans and the occasional proposal of alternative 
solutions also is meritorious. Im not talking about backseat coding here 
but rather offering an alternative perspective to create a well-rounded 
view of the goal and the bumps in the path to get there as well as some 
suggestions to traverse the trail efficiently. If it is the position of 
redhat that this isnt the case i understand but i think it is a mistake 
to limit input to that one group.

>Then tell me how else you do it? How to cull the signal from the noise?
>
>show me a better way and we'll get there lickety-damn-split.
>  
>
My best suggestion is to open the "new dev list" (aka maintainers) to 
people that serve other valuable roles or who routinely inject 
intelligent ideas into conversation on fedora-devel. Essentially i like 
the idea of a moderated list because i grow weary of a thread with 512 
msgs (slimfast slimfest) because it takes half my morning to weed 
through it and very few users read it and end up asking the same 
questions elsewhere in the list.

My only argument is that i think that people provide value in other ways 
than simply maintainership. Admit users to the list contingent on their 
behavior and ability to keep "noises off". If you find they are habitual 
flamers and dont contribute enough to justify the noise warn them, if it 
doesnt improve then thank them for the input and show them the door 
politely. If you start small with the whitelist and add users slowly it 
will be easy to manage and should maintain equilibrium without much 
influence. not to mention improve the level of decorum with which users 
treat each other on a smaller list with more accountability.

I think we should be honest and mention that it is unlikely that the 
devel list will maintain the same level of importance with the 
introduction of a new "working list". I dont fault anyone for this but 
there are only so many hours in the day and the S:N ratio will be so 
much lower on devel when everyone bails to maintainer that it will 
increasingly become more like "fedora-list" and justifiably less worth 
reading. I read lists in order of importance (based on time constraints) 
and fedora devel will drop way lower with the advent of maintainers.
-mf