knetworkmanager, nm-0.7

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 11/1/07, Chuck Anderson <cra at wpi.edu> wrote:
> Since when do we care about who ships what first?

I think its fair to say that people want to get some credit for the
hard work they are point into getting the deeper design stuff "right."
 It matters to developer morale and to overall health of the project.
We have to do a much better job at being able to point out the cool
crap that is going on under the hood and getting the laypress talking
about it and getting end-users excited about it.  The hard work needs
to be appreciated exactly because its HARD work.

But we seem to be stuck in a linux enthusiastic culture where the
technology under the hood isn't as important as the paint job and the
futurist styling.  We have to try to change the tone of the
discussion. We have to find a way to encourage people who are writing
articles and reviews to stop focusing on the immediate shallow gains
of each distribution release, but to start talking about how the
technology introduced in each release enables advances in future
releases.  As long as releases are reviewed as end-products and not an
steps along a path, the HARD work that Fedora developers are doing
will always be less applauded than it deserves to be.

But how do we do this?  My best idea would be to start extending the
Feature proposal process so that it has a multiple release horizon for
features, with technology milestones per release along that feature
path.  This gives us legitimate "technology preview" talking points
for features introduced in a release that aren't completely there yet
without the pressure of flipping the switch and turning them on by
default to claim them as our own.

-jef