FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Kevin Kofler]

Josh Boyer wrote:
> As I said in the meeting, the underlying motivation of your proposal
> appeared to me to be seated in more of a "promote KDE" manner than an
> actual "call the Gnome spin Gnome."  In that sense, changing the name of a
> spin will do nothing to further promote KDE.

Changing the name of the GNOME spin would eliminate some confusion (as
pointed out by me and others in this thread, the current name is quite
misleading, it implies to an uninformed person that either there's just a
single desktop in Fedora or all the options are supported on the "Desktop"
spin, neither of which is true), hopefully also get people to quit randomly
using "the desktop" or "Desktop" in discussions when they mean "GNOME", and
be fair to KDE, and also to XFCE and LXDE for that matter.

Of course it's not the only thing which needs fixing, but it's a pretty
obvious one and certainly the least controversial one (but the reactions
this simple unoffensive proposal for a mere name clarification has gotten
don't leave me very hopeful for the other changes I'd like to see :-( ).

Other things which need changing to make KDE equally supported include:
* making it easier to select KDE on the DVD installer (by a radiobutton
before the package selection, which should also influence the package
selection's behavior, see below),
* fixing comps so task-oriented groups like "Sound&Video" aren't biased
towards GNOME apps (this most likely requires extending the comps format or
having separate comps-kde and comps-gnome - I think extending the format to
handle conditionals based on the desktop selected via radiobutton would be
the more maintainable solution in the long run): where I'd like to get to
is that if I select Sound&Video after having selected GNOME as the desktop,
I get Totem and Rhythmbox by default and kdemultimedia, Amarok and Kaffeine
as optional checkboxes, but if I select Sound&Video after having selected
KDE as the desktop, I get kdemultimedia, Amarok and Kaffeine by default and
Totem and Rhythmbox as optional checkboxes,
* no longer hiding the KDE live image behind an extra click on the webpage,
* making sure KDE is taken into account when replacing core shared desktop
components like PolicyKit with incompatible versions (PolicyKit is just an
example here; thankfully, jreznik is taking care of PolicyKit 1 integration
with KDE)
and maybe some other things too.

But even getting only parts of this stuff changed would make things better
than the status quo. Fixing the GNOME-based spin's name to actually
contain "GNOME" would be one such small, but significant improvement over
the status quo and send an important message.

        Kevin Kofler