Fedora Core 3 Transferred to Fedora Legacy

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 1/23/06, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Interesting comparison.  I stopped using slackware as soon
> as another distro became easier to use.

It is an interesting comparison.. considering that slackware topped
linuxquestions.org members poll for 2004, which was held in feb of
2005.  Perhaps the lesson here is that no-one, not even you, have a
good idea as to what the community as a whole is interest in seeing
improvement in.  If you want to talk from personal experience, fine,
be specific as to which improvements in the installer you would like
to see, but don't try wrap yourself in the language of the average
user perspective nor try to suggest that fedora is out of step with
other open source projects simply because you have have decided that
certain projects are irrelevant to the common linux experience. You
nor I have any way to evaluate whether our opinions are representative
of anything more than a vocal minority.

Let me be a tad more blunt. Stop making general comparisons about
"other distros."  Stop using retorical constructions which attempt to
magnify your opinion that fedora is out of step with the larger
distribution space. Some distros do things better than others and the
evaluation of that depends on the person who is looking over the
distros. If you want to talk about the pros/cons of specific
functionality be as specific in your comparison drawing as you can
possibly be instead of casting wide statements about "other
distributions". What you are doing is nothing but grand standing for
effect. I demand specifics because I care about this project's
success.

What i suggest you do, is to take a moment make a list of specific
examples as to where the implementation in fedora installation process
could be modified.  Start a new thread for each idea, and support each
idea with specific examples of similar features implemented in
specifically named distributions. If after discussion on each of those
threads, you feel that your idea is still worth presenting to the Core
developers and Core release team, write an RFE in bugzilla and
reference the discussion thread for them to review.

I will speak from personal experience and say, that the more topics
this one thread covers, the less likely this discussion can be
followed later as a reference. If you are sincerely trying to invoke
change in the minds of the people who make decisions, you do yourself
a favor by constraining discussion in a particular thread as much as
possible to a specific implementable action instead of lumping all
your specific ideas together. And it will also be important to follow
up with a feature request into bugzilla which references the
discussion in the web archive of this mailinglist.

As much fun as it is to argue with you over the definition of things
like the line between proprietary hardware and proprietary software...
the fact of the matter is.. the final decision on any idea presented
here will most likely be made by people who are not active in this
discussion.  Keep your true audience in mind and make sure you do what
you can to keep discussion in any particular thread narrow.

-jef