FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Kevin Kofler]

Mathieu Bridon (bochecha) wrote:
> We have a Desktop team.

That's just yet another syndrom of the misnomer disease, though it's not
easy to change because that team is part of RH, not Fedora.

> So IMHO the default desktop is what they decide it to be.

Nonsense. The "Desktop Team" is an internal team at RH which has no
authority or mandate from Fedora to take such decisions.

> They are currently focused only on Gnome. If they were focused on KDE,
> then the default desktop would be KDE. To change that, it would take
> some KDE contributors to join the Desktop team.

That's a completely wrong premise. The so-called "Desktop Team" is a team at
RH specifically tasked to work on GNOME. KDE is NOT part of the Desktop
Team at RH, ltinkl and jreznik are on the Base OS Team at RH, not the
Desktop Team. (I'm not sure what organization unit Than Ngo is part of at
RH.)

What we could try to form is a Desktop SIG in Fedora comprising contributors
to all the desktops, but I don't see such a SIG as beneficial, it makes
more sense to be organized in one SIG per desktop. There was an attempt at
building a Desktop SIG, but that was really a GNOME SIG and it didn't live
very long. It seems to me that the "Desktop Team" at RH is not interested
in a true community SIG for GNOME, let alone in a cross-desktop Desktop
SIG.

> When both are as well represented in the Desktop team, then the
> default desktop might be both of them. If KDE becomes more represented
> in the Desktop team, then it might become the one default desktop.
> 
> To me, it's only a matter of who does the work. Would you complain
> that most of our webapps use TurboGears instead of Tomcat ? No, simply
> becasue that's what those who do the work (the Infrastructure team)
> decided to use. That's the same for the Desktop team.
> 
> It doesn't take any policy to change this fact. It takes people
> willing to do the job where it needs to happen, in the right team.
> 
> Just my thoughts anyway...

The problem is that you're fundamentally misunderstanding the nature and
purpose of the "Desktop Team".

        Kevin Kofler