FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Kevin Kofler]

Matthew Garrett wrote:
> The reality is that KDE *is* a second class citizen in Fedora - it
> doesn't get anywhere near the attention that Gnome does.

<SARCASM>Thanks</SARCASM> for insulting our (KDE SIG's) work yet again,
that's <SARCASM>really appreciated</SARCASM>! :-/

Where are the monthly bugfix updates of the entirety of GNOME in the stable
updates? Where are the updates to minor feature releases? Oh wait, they
don't exist! Yet we provide all this for KDE! We even provide a
semi-official unstable repository (at kde-redhat) with the latest beta KDE
backported to stable Fedora releases, again where's the equivalent service
for GNOME?

> If what you actually want is to change KDE's status, then that will
> involve attracting more developers

While we would of course appreciate more help, we have enough developers
right now to fully support KDE. It's the presentation on common Fedora
places like the download page which is lacking.

> and ensuring that they're as involved in the Fedora feature development
> process as the Gnome developers are.

Most of those features are upstream GNOME features which just happen to be
implemented by Fedora developers (or, in most cases more accurately, RH
developers) and which are inherently or by the nature of their
implementation GNOME-specific. It's simply unreasonable to expect KDE to
support every single new GNOME feature at the same time as GNOME, the
opposite is not true either!

We do track features which are required for distro integration and take
those seriously. I personally did a lot of the work to make these work.
Some success stories:
* ConsoleKit was supported in KDM right from Fedora 7 when it got
introduced. I did the integration work.
* PulseAudio got enabled by default in KDE at the same time as in GNOME
(Fedora 8). Rex Dieter did most of that work (it was coordinated through
IRC). It involved adding a startup script to kde-settings (no longer needed
in current releases because PulseAudio's startup is now handled through the
standard /etc/xdg/autostart mechanism) and making aRts (Fedora 8 was KDE 3)
work on top of it.
* FeatureDictionary (i.e. using hunspell throughout) was implemented for KDE
in the same release which implemented it in GNOME (Fedora 9). I did the
required patches (backporting the Sonnet Enchant backend to KDE 3's
KSpell2, adding hunspell support to the legacy KSpell (KDE 3) / K3Spell
(KDE 4)).

> Once that's done then it's time for a discussion of how the options should
> be presented, but right now claiming that the two are equivalent is simply
> false. Changing the text on the website doesn't alter that. Fix reality
> before trying to fix our description of it.

"Reality" doesn't need fixing, the website does. The work is being done
already.

> (And if KDE developers are failing to get involved in Fedora because of
> the layout of the download page, then I think there are larger
> problems...)

Can't you understand that volunteer developers are reluctant to work on a
distribution which considers their work second class?

You seem to either be completely unfamiliar with or have completely lost
touch with the concept of volunteer development, judging both from your
repeated insistence on full-time developers and from your lack of
understanding of what motivates or demotivates volunteers. Getting
paychecks from RH is not the only thing which can motivate people to
participate in Fedora!

I do a lot of work for Fedora completely for free, because I like Fedora and
want it to be great. Getting continuously criticized along with other
fellow SIG members (most of which are also unpaid volunteers) for
supposedly not doing enough when we're even doing things the GNOME
maintainers are not doing (such as new version backports, both stable ones
in official updates and unstable or regression-prone ones in a separate
unstable repository) is extremely frustrating and demotivating.

        Kevin Kofler