[fab] looking at our surrent state a bit

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Fri Nov 3 17:12:03 UTC 2006


Rahul Sundaram schrieb:
> 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?

The plan was to meet all two weeks IIRC. I think that should suffice if
it would be held in.

Maybe "meet once or twice a month on IRC, and once per month on phone"
would be even better.

>  Many 
> of the people in the board are going to be involved with other work 
> during a new release.

Sure. but both things are important.

>  For the rest of us, its volunteer work.

Well, Extras and many other community driven projects are able to meet
once a week. It works quite well there afaics.

>  What 
> does getting more involved into decisions and more presence involve? 

Comment/Issue a statement on the Legacy problem that was discussed on
LWN. Solve the RPM issue. Look at what discussion/topics took quite a
bit of attention on the important Fedora lists and in the news

> Like I said the meeting agenda and mins are already public.

Where is the agenda for the next meeting? Or a schedule similar to the
one FESCo has ( http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/Schedule ) so
people interested in the work can look at the current status?

Further take a look at
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/Meetings
{{{
Upcoming meetings:
 * October 3 (10:00 AM EDT, 2:00 PM GMT)
 * October 17 (5:00 PM EDT, 9:00 PM GMT)
}}}

Great work! (Sorry, but what shall I say)

>> 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. 

"Participating in a meeting" and "looking at the results" are two
different things.

> [...]
> To understand this better, ask yourself how many people not involved 
> with FESCo would actually sit in FESCo meetings

Round about as many as FESCo members participate actively in hte meeting.

> and express their opinions

Normally they are quiet most of the time. But they raise their voice if
they think that's needed or if it's an area where they are working. That
works quite well.

> or would you even want to listen to such opinions

We do. Why shouldn't we?

> at that time instead of doing it on the list?

Well, why meet then in any case? Because it does not work. So we meet on
IRC.

But why should we lock the community out there? That would be stupid.
Sure, there may be discussions that need to be held in private, but that
doesn't happen that often (and if, on the private fesco-list). Sure,
running the meetings will get hard if to many non-FESCo members raise
their voice, but we didn't hit that problem yet -- and if that problem
comes up we'll solve it in a way where we still can hear the opinion of
the community..

>> 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.

Well, contributing to core is still hard afaics.

>> 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.

Yeah, I'll consider that. thx for the pointer.

>>> 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?

Well, we're getting rhetorical here. For me it looks like that: Red Hat
failed to get the community involved properly/to build one up and thus
contributors wandered of elsewhere. Those stupid contributors like me
that work for Fedora in their free time are busy with a lot of stuff
already and don't have time to work on more stuff.

>> 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?

Well, some people might say that as we ship firmware packages in our kernel.

> I dont think this is a problem of users not 
> recognizing that Fedora is Free software but many not seeing the value 
> of that.

Agreed.

> Ideas welcome.

Hmm, I don't have one just now. I'll think about it, maybe something
springs to my mind.

>>> 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.

Take Gnome 2.12 as example: I'm sure many Red Hat developers worked
quite hard on it and got some quite nice improvements into it. But we
never shipped it in Fedora Core. Ubuntu and Suse did and took the glory
for it.

Just to repeat from my initial mail: I like it very much that Red
Hat/Fedora works directly on upstream so close. That's why I'm
contributing to Fedora. But we should not forget to improve our features
that are special in our product (Live-CD, anaconda, initscripts, ...)
over that. And that's what I think we're doing a bit these days.

>> 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.

See my other mail. Currently we are again, but will we stick with that
for FC7 and FC8. Remember, we missed a whole Gnome release between FC4
and FC5!

>> 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.

We should give users a chance to run their hardware they buy (even if
that hardare was brought to the market after FCx) -- and the drivers for
that sometimes require newer X.org releases, while the next FC with that
new X.org version might still be far away. So what do you suggest to
those users? Run Windows? Run Rawhide?

>> 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.

And that did not work often as updates from core confused it multiple times.

>[ripping firefox aside, see mails to jesse]
> 
> Major updates of GNOME post release as updates falls into the same "too 
> risky" category as Xorg updates for me.

Agreed. But I think FC4 should have get one, or FC5 should have shipped
way earlier.

> 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.

Agreed.

>> 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.

Ignoring the opinion from the community won't help building a community
around Fedora.

> 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.

And I like that :)

>> 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.

I think that's how it looks often from the outside. Remembers Fedora
Extras? It took quite some time after the fedora.us/Red Hat Linux
Project merger until it took of (one and a half year iirc).

> 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.

Okay, maybe I was barking at the wrong tree here. Sorry. Thanks all the
FDS developers for their great work (and Red Hat for open sourcing it).

> [...]

CU
thl




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