[fab] looking at our surrent state a bit

[Rahul Sundaram]

Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

>>> Well, contributing to core is still hard afaics.
>> You can very easily send patches and participate in anaconda-list if you 
>> have any interest in contributing.
> 
> anaconda is only one part of core. I meant Core as a whole.

The same applies to the rest of the core. Core/Extras is all about 
packaging. At the code level, it doesnt prevent contributors from 
getting involved at all. So attributing any alleged slowness of Anaconda 
  development to "openness" of core itself doesnt seem to be the right 
idea to me. If you want to contribute, every project in Fedora can get 
patches through bugzilla. We have already had hundreds of patches from 
external people that has been merged in core. I dont disagree that 
opening up core is beneficial for *other reasons* and there are ways for 
people to contribute towards that but it dont expect it to speed up say 
Anaconda or initscript development on its own. Just expressing that so 
that we dont expect this to be the magic bullet that solves all the 
development issues.

> 
> Well, I've reached the point where I'd think we need to get our own
> stuff much more improved (Live-CD, initscripts), even if we need to get
> less improvments into gnome or the kernel for one develont cycle.
> 
>>>>> 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.
>> So does Debian.
> 
> Put they planed to change that. Anyway, it was just a example, not worth
> debating out. Debian IMHO is seen as real open-source distribution in
> the linux-community and we should try to get a similar fame.

Well, you claim we are worse than Debian in some aspects with regard to 
be a Free software distribution. Just pointing out we are not at this 
stage. Getting that message out is a different aspect. Before we do 
that, I would like to see that licensing audit to cross check licensing 
in Fedora Extras to be completed. Other stuff is waiting on FSF to let 
us know their standing.

>> I would prefer we discuss things on the terms of Fedora rather go into a 
>> competitive comparison. Yes, sometimes GNOME or Firefox or Xorg or KDE
>> would do a release in the middle of Fedora development which we wont be 
>> able to accommodate. People would have to wait for the next release if 
>> they want that. We might skip releases and pick the next one. When 
>> upstream projects work in a distributed fashion, it is inevitable that 
>> some project or the other wont be coordinated with Fedora. This is not 
>> news.
> 
> /me gives up here -- seems I can't get Rahul to understand what I'm up to

I pointed out a scenario we have been hit with many times during 
development of Fedora releases. I would like to hear how your ideas on 
how to solve that without affecting the quality of the release and updates.

>> Wait for the next release.
> 
> Please tell that somebody who just bought a new computer or hardware
> component and what's to use that now.

This is going to happen with every distribution and we are getting 
changes out much faster than many. Pushing out major updates every time 
is *not* the solution. I dont see any alternative. Aligning ourselves 
with major new GNOME, KDE, Xorg releases at the same time will not be 
always possible.

> 
>> We wont be pushing everything as updates.
> 
> I didn't request that. Seems you don't want to hear me on that, too.

No I hear you but I am seeing potential issues with this. See below.

>> If a major release of Xorg follows 3 months after GNOME with a Fedora 
>> release somewhere in between
> 
> That would not have happened if Fedora releases were aligned with the
> ones from Gnome.

Why wouldnt it happen? To give you a hypothetical example. Lets assume 
we align Fedora Core 7 with GNOME 2.18. Xorg 7.2 gets released 3 months 
after the release of Fedora Core 7. What would you do then? Push out the 
Xorg release as an update to Fedora Core 7? We will have to wait the 
next release of Fedora itself otherwise we risk regressions.

>> We are trying to solve the bigger problem instead.
> 
> And you keep the community out.

How exactly? Working with the infrastructure team is what is required 
and everyone is welcome to get involved.

Rahul