Fedora 7

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 1/9/07, Paul Michael Reilly <pmr at pajato.com> wrote:
> Speaking from a community perspective, YES.

Speaking from a community perspective, i completely and utterly
disagree with you.
I say we have a dance-dance-revolution dance off to decide which of us
really speaks for the community.

Go back and read my posts concerning my take on the branding issue.
There is room in the spin-space for a Gnome spin that is separate from
the Desktop spin, and you'll note that David, a member of the desktop
agreed with me about the potential future existence of pure Gnome
spin. We absolutely MUST stop this petty bickering over branding.  You
have to view this entire Fedora project experiment as an incremental
growth process. If you ball your fist and shake it in the air shouting
'viva la revolution' at every opportunity you are missing the whole
point about building a sustainable long term collaboration space.

I think its pretty clear, that there is a substantial communication
break-down specifically with the Desktop team which is impairing our
ability to plan for the future. We aren't going to fix the fundamental
communication issue, by standing on soapboxes and demanding to be
heard or demanding that current decisions be undone. We may have a
chance to fix some of the underlying communication issues at FudCon so
we can avoid further bloodshed for the future. I swear to Bob that I'm
going to make sure that everyone when my physical reach during any
discussions over the communication gap will participating in such
discussion in a constructive conversation about how to fix it, instead
of just throwing around blame and accusations.  Herding cats is hard,
but I found you can get a misbehaving cat to respond to you with a
simple squirt of water from a spray bottle. We'll see if the save
corrective action works for codemonkeys at FUDCon.

But more importantly in the near term. the fact that there is going to
be a KDE spin is a fundamentally important step in terms of opening
the process for community involvement. How about we, as engaged and
proactive community members, focus on making the technical side of
that happen. Whether the Desktop spin is called the Desktop spin or
the  'Office Professional Workforce of Doom' spin its trivially
unimportant compared to helping Rex get the KDE spin out the door.

The WHOLE idea of opening up the spin space for community involvement
is way way way too new to be hung up over what this crap is going to
be called in the long run.  It's an evolving process, and we need to
learn when to put away the pitchforks and torches and accept
incremental gains, learn to accept that disagreements will happen in
the short term, and learn to accept that there is value towards
building long term consensus by the application of persist ant and
rational lobbying for ideas.

We absolutely MUST stop creating bad blood by insisting on belaboring
the flaws in how communication between Core planning and community
planning as been so far handled. What is happening right now isn't
helping, all we are doing now is fostering a environment where people
are talking past each other.

The Desktop spin is meant to be a best-of-breed spin, which may change
over time as applications change. That is not a bad thing.  There is
room in spin space for both a Gnome and KDE spin in addition to the
Desktop spin, as I have written in previous posts. Time will tell if
the Gnome zealots who would like to see a vanilla Gnome application
stack in a spin including gnumeric,abiword,ephinany will step up and
manage the creation of a purist Gnome spin that does not suffer from
the application best-of-breed trade-offs in the Desktop spin.


-jef"my pitchfork is bigger than yours"spaleta