FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Matthew Garrett]

On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 04:22:34AM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > You're presenting a false choice. Given current resources, it's not
> > possible to support both Gnome and KDE to the same level.
> 
> Unjustified claim.

Not in the slightest. We have a finite quantity of developer time. 
Currently more of that is spent on Gnome than on KDE. Providing the same 
level of KDE support involves either finding a large number of full-time 
developers to work on KDE or moving some of the Gnome development effort 
over to KDE.

> KDE works just fine even now, in fact we actually update KDE much more
> actively in post-release updates than the GNOME maintainers update GNOME.
> The only part of "support" we're truly missing is political /
> presentation-related.

No. You're missing documentation. You're missing integration.

> > Treating both identically would mean reducing our involvement in Gnome,
> 
> Huh? I'm not expecting our GNOME developers to suddenly work on KDE! Nobody
> is asking for that. Better KDE support will have no effect at all on GNOME.

Where does this better support magically come from? The number of people 
working on KDE in Fedora is small compared to the number of people 
working on Gnome in Fedora.

> > without there being any strong evidence that in doing so we'd increase the
> > size of the Fedora user base.
> 
> KDE is the preferred desktop of about half (give or take a dozen percentage
> points depending on whom you ask) of the GNU/Linux desktop users. It seems
> blatantly obvious to me that supporting it well is a way to attract users.

Why? The natural choice for KDE users right now is either OpenSuse or 
Kubuntu. Why would these users choose Fedora instead?

> > Crippling Gnome in order to ship two above-average desktops might
> > be "fair", 
> 
> Where did I ask to cripple GNOME? I don't want to cripple anything!

The alternative is to provide enough resources to be able to hire 
several full time KDE developers.

> > but Ubuntu would have a better Gnome desktop and Suse would have a better
> > KDE desktop.
> 
> That's not a given. In fact several people who tried multiple distros have
> found Fedora's current KDE packaging to be the best KDE 4 packaging around.
> (Of course, it's all a matter of taste, openSUSE is also often claimed to
> be the "best" KDE 4, and sometimes other names come up as well.) The
> assertion that we do not have the resources to provide a high-quality KDE
> packaging is ludicrous and an insult to me and all the other KDE SIG
> members.

My simple assertion is that a desktop maintained by a small number of 
part-time volunteers is unlikely to be of the same quality as one 
maintained by a larger number of full-time workers. To say otherwise 
would imply that Suse's maintainers are incompetent.

> > The only way we can be relevant is to concentrate development on one
> > desktop.
> 
> Nonsense. See above. And in fact both the competitors you quote don't do
> this, Ubuntu has Kubuntu, openSUSE supports both GNOME and KDE and presents
> them as equally-supported options in the installer and on the download
> page.

Kubuntu is primarily volunteer-based, though does have some amount of 
full-time work - but overall, the Ubuntu development process is heavily 
focused on Ubuntu and not Kubuntu. Aspects of the Gnome stack in 
OpenSuse are focuses of development, but again the bias is clear. 
Fedora's clearly a better Gnome desktop than OpenSuse is.

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