[fab] looking at our surrent state a bit

[Bill Nottingham]

Thorsten Leemhuis (fedora at leemhuis.info) said: 
> == Fedora Project Board ==
> 
>  * 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

Well, we have public minutes. What other things do you think the board
should be doing?

Realistically, the board does not have *direct* resources where it
can by itself implement things other than policy.

> quite slow. And not only that, also the infrastructure of Fedora for the
> community (new VCS, let community help in Core, ...) seems to go forward
> quite slowly (e.g. nearly nothing).

We're working on that. FC6 and associated releases got in the way
of doing much work in this area.

>  The Live-CD is a good example for the problems -- how long are we
> working on it now without a real result? Much to long!

So, counter-argument here. Most all the work for LiveCDs is being done
by the non-RH community. If the community has not been able to progress
this to a 'real result', what is that saying? I would like to get to
the point where progress can be made in areas without direct RH involvement.

> Readahead improvements like
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=156442 linger
> around without much process for ages.  73 of 850 files in readahed.early
> and 441 of  3757 files in readahead.later don't even exist on FC7.
> Readahead.later should run as last app in the init process, but doesn't
> as there are several other initscripts that run at level 99 (some of
> them are started after readahead later). There was much talk about a new
> init system but nothing real came out of it (and Ubuntu got all the
> credits for their upstart in between). Starting some jobs in parallel/or
> while the log-in screen is shown was in the discussion and even in
> testing once, but seems to have vanished again (Opensuse does something
> like that these days iirc). And RHGB still starts once, ends, and a new
> X is fireed of for the real session :-/. Takes some more time again.

I should do some comparisons again, but I do believe that FC6 bootup
is a good 10-20% faster than a similar bootup from FC2/FC3. It's not
particularly revolutionary, but we do make some progress.

That being said, there are always more ideas than there is time.

> content." (quote from http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives ). Well,
> that's true in some parts of Fedora (nearly always latest KDE, major
> kernel updates, Gnome Updates to 2.x.0 to 2.x.[0-9], lot's of updates in
> Extras-Land), but fail in other areas (no gutenprint in FC6 [a lot of
> printers are not supported due to that], only Firefox 1.5[Ubuntu 6.10
> shipped two days after FC6 and has Firefox 2.0 and gutenprint] and no
> sign of a update in Core to FF 2.0,

How is breaking all the users extensions a *good* thing? FF 2.0 has
landed in rawhide, and yes, it does browse. But now extensions like
mugshot or adblock, etc. no longer work.

> no X.org-Update to 7.1 [even after
> the proprietary drivers where able to handle it; owners of G965 hardware
> were left out in the cold without Support in Fedora due to this as the
> driver for that popular hardware depends on/is shipped in Xorg 7.1],

They're not left out - it's in Fedora Core 6. And the driver *still*
isn't fully baked (I know, I've got a i965 box on my desk.) I'd prefer
not to give users of a stable release a driver that only starts X correctly
once or twice per boot.

>  * Gnome and Firefox as a lot of users are interested to run the latest
> version of those packages (sure, that's often stupid, but that's how it is)

So, it is better to constantly backport features to existing releases
rather than work on pushing the next release forward? That's the tradeoff
you're suggesting here.

>  * X.org and gutenprint, as hardware support is crucial -- that sucks
> even more as out hardware support in other areas of Fedora is quite good
> as kernel and packages like sane get updates to new upstream version
> regularly

I call bullshit on this. X.org is always the latest release available
at the time the distro is frozen, and we've been working hard to get new
features and better hardware support into it. All the autoconfiguration
work in FC6? Done by Red Hat, and I do believe available in Fedora Core
first.

>  Why don't we have a public roadmap? That might give community members
> at least a chance to get interested in topics and start helping getting
> them done.

So, for many cases, it's follow-the-roadmap-for-the-upstream-project.
We can do better here, but, for example, there's a lot that's just
'whatever GNOME ships.'

> 
> == Fedora Extras ==
> 
...
>  * we can't do anything we'd like to do; I hope we can get a bit more
> support from RH in the future

Huh?

Bill