FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[Matthew Garrett]

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 03:33:28PM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:

> Remember kids, we probably shouldn't be listening to you. Red Hat
> Desktop == Smart. You == Dumb.

The problem with the desktop is that it's obvious, looks simple and 
everyone has an opinion on it. But not all of these opinions are equally 
valid. This kind of situation is much easier to deal with in, say, the 
kernel VM system - in that case it would be perfectly acceptable for 
people who spend their entire working lives concentrating on a specific 
topic to say that they know better than people who occasionally touch 
upon it.

The real question is whether we believe that the people who spend their 
lives working on the Fedora desktop have a better understanding of the 
issues than people who don't. I've disagreed with various decisions 
they've made, and in some cases argued quite strongly. I've then often 
discovered that they've done significantly more research than I have, 
have carefully considered the issues that I thought were blindingly 
obvious and have come to a conclusion based on the work that they've 
done. In the majority of cases I've ended up agreeing with their 
position. These aren't dictators who change software behaviour on a 
whim. They're professionals who are doing their very best to make the 
Fedora desktop a modern and usable system. And so it's entirely 
unsurprising if they become upset at being told by a group of people who 
*don't* work in that field that they're wrong, in the same way that I'd 
end up pretty furious if FESCO overruled me on a power management issue 
ten days after we passed final freeze.

It's not about smart versus dumb. If we trust these people then we have 
to assume that in most cases they *will* know better than people who 
argue against them on mailing lists. And if we don't trust them then 
there's something pretty fundamentally wrong with the way we're 
producing this distribution.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org