Distrowatch on Fedora this year

[Christopher Aillon]

On 12/17/2007 07:24 PM, John Poelstra wrote:
> Christopher Aillon said the following on 12/17/2007 09:27 AM Pacific Time:
>> On 12/17/2007 05:43 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> Christopher Aillon wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Then we need people to tell the world.  Our engineers should not 
>>>> have to hold this burden.  They are doing an awesome job with coding 
>>>> up all the features.
>>>
>>> It wouldn't be a burden to tell the world that we are doing what we 
>>> are doing then. One simple way to do this it to just blog more often. 
>>> Our engineers do that sometimes but way less than ideal. 
>>
>> NURRRRRR.  BZZZZZT.  WRONG WRONG WRONG.
>>
>> If an engineer happens to take time out of their busy lives, and time 
>> away from doing awesome feature work for Fedora 9, then consider it a 
>> bonus.  Expecting this from any engineer is just insane.
> 
> Even if it would be helpful?

It would also be helpful if everyone filed bugs with patches.  :-)

Thing is, there's helpful, and there's expecting it.  It's nice when 
someone does the blogging thing.  I'll agree 100%.  I'm very much 
against the notion some people have that when people aren't, the 
developers are lazy or not doing their jobs or whatever.

It's not really a secret that many hackers have some social 
dysfunctions.  Some don't feel comfortable with their grammar.  Some 
people really feel it's not their job to write articles.  Or just don't 
have the ability to turn a paragraph into something that sounds awesome. 
  I've seen some really lousy marketing done by people who are PAID to 
do marketing.

But engineers do provide updates, on the feature pages.  And they will 
answer questions if asked on IRC.  I think it would be great if the 
community reached out to the engineers, since the engineers are reaching 
out to the community by way of the code they write.  Find one on IRC, 
ask about your favorite project.  Tell him you'd like to blog about it. 
  Maybe do an interview.

Keep in mind that if you expect just the engineers to blog about it, 
we're limiting our contributor base, and we're limiting our marketing 
efforts to "when an engineer has time".  We have a lot of smart people 
in the community and project, and they can help spread the word just as 
well as an engineer can.