Fedora 7

[David Zeuthen]

On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 23:17 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> David Zeuthen wrote:
> >> Fedora-desktop list is not getting much traffic.
> > 
> > True, it's mostly people who ask support questions / asking for 
> > misguided features. Sadly.
> 
> Calling it fedora-desktop-devel list might have avoided that problem to 
> some extent.

Maybe. I just don't think people who need support etc. bother (See: this
list).

> > Not entirely true; Rahul, you have access to that list and not a lot of 
> > _Fedora_ planning is going on so stop spreading misinformation. It's 
> > mainly used for RHEL stuff. It's true that we have some mails sometimes 
> > discussing early features for Fedora and, sure, in some instances we 
> > still need to move the last 5% to the external list. Wrt to IRC we also 
> > have many discussions externally on #fedora-desktop.
> 
> I dont really have access to all of the internal lists. I could update 
> the external wiki pages with the information in some of the lists that I 
> do have access to but that would risk putting out confidential stuff. 

My point was that little or no interesting Fedora conversations are
going on at that list. You are able to verify this my looking at the
internal Red Hat mailman archives for said list. But you didn't, you
assumed - and posted that to a Fedora community list - that we're
talking about a lot of secretive stuff. Which is wrong. That's what so
bad. 

(And of course you should never post information from one internal list
to another, you're missing the point if that's what you think I'm asking
you to do.)

> Who knows about these fedora-desktop irc discussions apart from the 
> desktop team itself? Would you consider moving it from Gimpnet to 
> Freenode along with the rest of the channels? When any considerable 
> discussions happen on irc, it needs to be posted on the Fedora wiki page 
> (preferably with meeting mins) for folks to look back. If noone within 
> the team has time for this, send me the logs and I will do it.

Not sure it's worthwhile moving it; I for one want it to stay on GimpNet
such as to stay close to upstream IRC channels. Posting minutes is a lot
of work; if people use IRC for such activitites (and we don't I think)
it's better to discuss on a mailing list. 

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".

> > For example, I did post the f-u-s proposal; it didn't receive much 
> > feedback at all. My take is that the Fedora community largely isn't very 
> > interested in the desktop (I would loved to be proved wrong, don't take 
> > this in a non-constructive way); in that way we're succesful, for 
> > example an avid Fedora user is Richard Hughes and I deal a lot with him 
> > on upstream lists discussing features in hal and g-p-m.
> 
> I think that's because not many people know about fedora-desktop list. 
> Would you think merging it with fedora-devel list would be a good thing?

No way, it needs to be developers solely interested in the _development_
of the desktop, not this forum we have on this list which is more
packaging-entry. It's way too noisy to get any desktop development done
on this list I think.

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?

> > The desktop team is understaffed, we spend a lot of time in bugzilla and 
> > doing packaging rather than development. I think you don't realize this 
> > and this is bad as you should know such things being an RH employee. And 
> > this is bad.
> 
> Ahem. I think you are forgetting our earlier irc conversations. You cant 
> reasonably expect me to keep track of all the development work happening 
> more than I do so now. I bet I know more about it than maybe less than 
> half a dozen people in India. Telling me that I am somehow spreading FUD 
> might shut me up but is not going to help solve the problem that some of 
> the development is not as transparent as it could be.

Well, just get the facts before posting because spreading misinformation
(which I'm accusing you of) is bad. 

There's not a lot of desktop development going in _Fedora_ and it's not
because the RH Desktop team is being secretive about it. It's because we
either do Bugzilla / Packaging work (which I personally hate as I think
my time is much better spent on writing code) or have the
conversations / do development upstream like we should. 

On a constructive note, how can we raise awareness in the Fedora
community that development needs to happen upstream if possible? How can
we easily direct people to gnome.org mailing lists and IRC channels?

(Of course, for some things Fedora _is_ the upstream, see e.g. the
livecd development work. That's open and going well.)

      David