Fedora 7

[David Zeuthen]

On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 23:49 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> David Zeuthen wrote:
> 
> > My point was that if someone wants to make Fedora a better desktop,
> > start by jumping on IRC and interactive with us! I'd be thrilled to see
> > Fedora users come out and say "hey, I want to write this or that app".
> 
> People usually realise the existence of irc channels because of the 
> frequent updates from them. For example, Fedora Extras Steering 
> Committee has a public schedule and post summaries from all the meetings 
> they have on a weekly basis.
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras

It's comparing apple's and orange's. Extras has very concrete needs to
be that organized because if the repo is not consistent it breaks for
everybody. Desktop _development_ as opposed to packaging is just
different.

> > Again, people should get involved in upstream GNOME and upstream fd.o
> > development. People just _don't_ seem to get this - just look at the NM
> > sub-thread of this thread. This surely belongs on
> > networkmanager-list at gnome.org and _people_ still don't get it. Well,
> > maybe I'm ranting but the thread here did show good ideas - why not take
> > it to the upstream list where we have more NM wizards that Dan Williams?
> 
> Users would see that as part of Fedora development rather than wanting 
> to post to all the different upstream mailing lists. I can talk about NM 
> here but I am not inclined to subscribe to another mailing list just to 
> post a few points.

Well, sorry but software development is just damn hard and it requires
that you actually engage with the community at hand rather than just
post hand-wavy comments. If you cannot engage yourself enough to
subscribe to an upstream list to provide feedback then so be it. Yes,
this is harsh but I'm really tired of this attitude.

Suggest to just post your points in Bugzilla at least so it's tracked;
I've seen way too many people decrease the S/N ratio on e.g. this list
with misguided feature requests and rants about upstream software
components. 

It's definitely not useful, it's scaring away core Fedora contributors
(TBH I've thought of unsubscribing from this list several times), it
creates tons of flame wars and it's _not_ something we should encourage.
Please, everyone, in the future please _do_ direct people to appropriate
upstream lists / Bugzilla. If people are too lazy or busy to do that
then so be it, it's a loss I can live with.

Btw, I'd rather just fix the technical problem of not having to
subscribe to a list to post comments. E.g. if you are subscribed to one
@redhat.com list you should be able to post to all. Heck, perhaps that
even gives you posting privileges to the appropriate fd.o and gnome
lists too. And the lists shouldn't cut out Cc's either like we do today.
Our lists are not set up to be friendly in that regard... but that can
change.

All this talk about Fedora community is good. But I think people are
missing out that there's a world beyond Fedora (upstream) that you
_need_ to interact with if you want to make a difference. It also scales
a helluva better.

(sorry if I'm being an ass about things but sometimes it's better to say
what you think.)

     David