Fedora Spins and "where will this end?"

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Sebastian Dziallas <sebastian at when.com> wrote:
> The question I would like to ask is: "Where will all this lead to?"
Where does it lead...it leads to a lot of spins. We've known that for
a while.  What we hope is that the Spin SIG leads to higher quality
and more maintainable spins.

The Spin SIG is the process by which we can tier these efforts so we
do not have to support each and every spin concept as part of the
"Release" process.

Fact 0:
We want people to build quality spins.
Fact 1:
our spin creation tools are make it dirt simple to create spins, but
we still need a best-practices approach with human review to ensure
quality.
Fact 2:
We do not have the resource to build and host every possible spin that
the community is interested in building.


Its perfectly okay if our community wants to build 100 different solid
spin concepts that we could brand as Fedora. If you and warren need to
work in parallel to get spin concepts up and running that target
similar but different usage cases..that's okay too.  The key idea is
this, with the Spin SIG and the kickstart pool, community members like
yourself can work on these things, can even build these things via
Fedora infrastructure. The Spin SIG sets defines the quality bar for
what lives in the kickstart pool.  Everyone who wants to brand their
spin as a Fedora spin, and we do want people to be able to call these
things Fedora, need to meet the technical and quality bars that the
Spin SIG defines.

And you know what else, over time, as we get more comfortable with usb
as a delivery mechanism and the size of affordable usb thumb drives
continues to go up this will impact what we think of as space limits
on a spin and people will push beyond the cd or dvd size boundary and
target there spin images for usb keys...that's okay to. At that point
you and warren might ba able to merge your efforts..and that would be
wonderful.

But the Fedora Project doesn't have to "release" these sorts of spins
as part of any Fedora Release..even once they are granted access to
the trademark.  What does that mean? That means community members need
to find their own hosting to point users to for the spin binaries they
produce.  And you know what that is completely okay too.  We simply do
not have the resources to host everything that people in our community
want to do. As Spins become more popular and more innovative we will
have to make some hard choices as to which Spins should be part of a
particular Fedora release, every release period. Competition for
scarce resources is the responsible approach to resource management.

And that is where the release process comes in. Spins can be submitted
for release selection..I believe right now that is expected to happen
as part of the Release Feature process..releases are chosen based on
merit and constrained by infrastructure resources set aside for spins.
 If a spin isn't part of a release, then it doesn't get official
project hosting..but it can still get trademark access because it
lives in the kickstart pool.  It's a compromise that lifts up the best
of the best while still letting new spin development flourish.

-jef