[fab] looking at our surrent state a bit

[Rahul Sundaram]

Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram schrieb:
>> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>>>  * it's not that much present -- we know it exists, but that's often all.
>>>  * seems to meet quite seldom and it's hard to see what it does or if
>>> there even is progress somewhere
>> We havent had a meeting in the last few weeks due to the release work 
>> and other things but whenever there is one, the agenda is posted here 
>> and post meeting results are available in the wiki and send to 
>> fedora-announce list.
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/Meetings/
>> What else could be done?
> 
> IMHO: Meet more often. Get more involved into decisions. Show presence.

Please be more detailed. How often do you want the board to meet?  Many 
of the people in the board are going to be involved with other work 
during a new release.  For the rest of us, its volunteer work.  What 
does getting more involved into decisions and more presence involve? 
Like I said the meeting agenda and mins are already public.

> Well, phone meetings are okay. That's why I suggested "now and then meet
> on irc" -- then everyone can get in contact with the board now and then
> while it can still get work done. That gets rid of the "secret cabal"
> look that some outsiders might have.

See above. There is nothing preventing anyone from discussing the 
results when the meeting mins or agenda are posted. Contacting the board 
is pretty easy though we recommend people post to this list instead 
unless it is some that needs to private.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board#Contact

To understand this better, ask yourself how many people not involved 
with FESCo would actually sit in FESCo meetings and express their 
opinions or would you even want to listen to such opinions at that time 
instead of doing it on the list?
> 
> Yes and no -- The team does a good job, but looking back it took quite
> some time until anaconda was capable of using Extras during install. To
> long IMHO. Installing packages from CD/DVD also is still lacking.

It is a lot of work to change Anaconda to support custom repositories. I 
am sure more contributors are welcome.

> I know, and Jesse, Jeremy, Bill and the others are doing great work, but
> their days are only 24 hours long, too (and their work days are limited,
> too).

A call for more volunteers to join the team was send out to 
fedora-announce list. You can look at wiki pages at 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure and contact the relevant 
people to help out in any of the work. Progress is already documented 
there to a good extend.

>> Official CD releases are unfortunately taking a longer time but 
>>   if various sub projects would require Red Hat developers to work on 
>> them  that would essential mean we would have to prioritize the work.
> 
> Exactly that's what I'd like to see.

That's already happening. If Red Hat has to get involved with all these 
projects to make changes happen, where would that leave Fedora as a 
community project?

> Not sure, I'm not a marketing guy. But we need to communicate better
> that we're nearly as free as Debian (here and there we are worse, in
> other areas we are better afaics). Most people don't know that afaics.

Where are we worse? I dont think this is a problem of users not 
recognizing that Fedora is Free software but many not seeing the value 
of that. Ideas welcome.

>> That's the essence of free software.
> 
> I know that, but it seems you didn't understand what I was up to.

No I dont obviously. Please explain.

> No, I think we should align out schedule to Gnome, as it is a crucial
> part of our product.

Oh come on. Fedora is already very well aligned with the GNOME release 
schedules.

> 
> Xorg: yes. The updates improve hardware support and are often needed to
> get the latest Hardware running. And that's why I think why we should
> ship them often (still needs to be decided on a case by case basis).

I dont think shipping Xorg major releases as updates is a good idea now. 
We should avoid that IMO.

> Sure. That's not what I proposed. But if there are important things
> missing (FF 2.0 in FC6; AIGLX in FC5, Gnome Update in FC4) then try to
> get a solution that makes installing those software possible easily (the
> AIGLX on FC5 was more a disaster because it was poorly maintained).

AIGLX on FC5 was not installed by default. It was a *experimental* 
separate repository that users had to go and install by themselves. The 
reasons for not moving into Firefox 2.0 was well explained by the 
Firefox developer and maintainer.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-October/msg00624.html

Major updates of GNOME post release as updates falls into the same "too 
risky" category as Xorg updates for me. Unlike KDE which is mostly 
encapsulated within itself, GNOME depends on more "system bits" like HAL 
and DBus etc. Now KDE has started using these too and I would wary of 
decisions to do major updates on this.

> 
> I had something like FESCo im mind. E.g. more members (maybe even from
> outside of RH), public meetings, summaries to the list.

Having core as a Red Hat maintainer repository while having non-RH 
people in the steering committee doesnt really have any significant 
impact. What we are working on is fundamentally changing this idea by 
getting rid of the core/extras wall which requires infrastructure 
changes that is being done.

> 
> Yeah, warren mentioned something during yesterdays meeting. But it took
> quite some time and that's the biggest problem in Fedora -- everything
> takes a long time.

This is very broad generalization. Having you looked at the work being 
done in Fedora Directory Server since it was open sourced? For a long 
time FDS itself was open source but required the Sun JVM to work. That 
means we couldnt have included it in Fedora.  It wouldnt have o past the 
review stage if that was initiated since it deviated widely from the 
packaging guidelines we have setup.


> That's a lot of work (mainly on the infrastructure side) and I more and
> more get the impression that with our current manpower it will take one
> or two years until we might have it in place. A little bit help from
> someone that getting payed for his work might help

See Jesse Keating and other replies from the infrastructure team on this

Rahul