Fedora 7

[David Zeuthen]

On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 20:25 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 1. people can not interact directly with all the upstreams Fedora
> builds on (do you? not just the parts you're working on but all the
> other bit you use). 

It's not that bad really; desktop-devel-list at gnome.org ,
xdg-list at freedesktop.org and so forth. Just reading people's blogs are
often enough.

> Even a dozen upstream MLs is sufficient to saturate any inbox.

Well, software development is hard and specialized, sorry. It's just
_not_ _useful_ that people use fedora-devel-list instead of getting
involved in upstream projects. See my other mail for details.

> 2. rahul is one of the few people that tries to be active on the various
> Fedora channels and put everything together, if you find him clueless
> why I can't begin to imagine what your opinion of a basic community
> contributor is

I didn't say that; I said he was spreading misinformation that the
desktop team does things in secret. Rahul does a lot of useful stuff but
when I see things like that I need to respond.

> 3. you complain the desktop team is misunderstood but as far as I know
> its only frontend is http://fedora.redhat.com/About/Projects/desktop/
> (almost no info, retired wiki, no reference to the famous irc channel
> everyone should know of)

That should probably be fixed, sure. There used to be a nice page on
fedora.redhat.com with this including pointers to upstream lists. Why
the Community Relations (Warren? Rahul?) people involved in Fedora
haven't fixed that I don't know; perhaps they expected the software
developers in the RH desktop team to do that? Perhaps there's some
misunderstanding about responsibilities that needs to be sorted out.
I'll ask my manager to sort this out.

I'm not saying we're perfect, just that most members of the RH desktop
team is focused on upstream work because.. that's where the decisions
are made. That's just reality. And one Fedora mantra is to do things
upstream. (It's interesting that the kernel people don't take the same
flame as us for this attitude)

> 4. you feel you spend too much time on packaging work yet you totally
> ignore all the non-redhat people packaging desktop bits in current
> Extras. They're not going to help you if you persist being in stealth
> mode.

True. This discussion is way to heated so I can see I wasn't being
constructive there; apologies to those that felt hurt. Sorry.

      David