[fab] looking at our surrent state a bit

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Rahul Sundaram schrieb:
> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> The plan was to meet all two weeks IIRC. I think that should suffice if
>> it would be held in.
> It has been. It was not during FC6 release time because people in the 
> board were involved in it. Thats all.

Only one meeting in July, August and September and none in October -- is
that the timeframe of "during FC6 release"? Well, then FC7 release time
starts soon again.

>> 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)
> This was the original plans and it has been postponed due to release 
> work as stated already.

Well, then at least someone should have updated that page...

> I prefer that interval to stay as it is rather 
> than complete wipe it out. 
>> "Participating in a meeting" and "looking at the results" are two
>> different things.
> You can discuss the results in the list.

Not many people are probably interested to discuss things after they
were decided. And such a behavior will hinter building a community
because they want to get involved before a decisions is done -- even if
the results that later is found doesn't match what they want.

> I dont see any functional 
> difference. I prefer the list before it makes it easier for a wider 
> community to respond without sitting on the channel at the same time.

Sure, list before is good. But I don't think it's enough.

>> 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.
> I read FESCo meeting mins everytime and I dont see many non FESCo 
> members actively participating or commenting in between meetings.

They can if they want (that's important) and they do:

http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/SteeringCommittee/Meeting-20061005
nirk -> stopped counting after 10 lines
mmcgrath -> stopped counting after 10 lines
other voices from: ixs, skvidal, adrianr, jima, daniel_hoza, delero

http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/SteeringCommittee/Meeting-20061102
not that many contributions from non-fesco members, but there were
voices from jima, f13

>> Well, why meet then in any case? Because it does not work. So we meet on
>> IRC.
> The meeting is for FESCo members. 

No, those are the meeting to organize Extras, and contributors are meant
to participate.

> If non FESCo members start actively 
> participating and expressing their opinions on the channels then it 
> would become tiresome pretty soon.

It worked fine in the past months. And it seems all people likes it that
way.

> If you want to hear opinions of the 
> larger community its better to do that on the list instead of in between 
> the meeting which can be done in this list for the board meetings.

Sure, we do it on list, too.

>> But why should we lock the community out there? That would be stupid.
> That is exactly how FESCo meetings were held before.

And that's why we stopped that one year ago!

> This doesnt lock 
> out community if the meetings results are published regularly and can be 
> dicussed in the lists.

That never happens. I can understand that -- why discuss something that
was decided? It's to late anyway. People will only raise voices if they
really think the decsions FESCo did is really bad.

>> 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).
> If we force ourselves to have public discussions everytime,

I didn't request that.

> we wont be 
> able to discuss things freely effectively. Some things are better off
> discuss between people offlist or in a private list or meeting.

Sure. But stuff that can be discussed in the open should be discussed in
the open.

> Board 
> discussions are usually of this nature and I believe many people prefer 
> talking on phone to IRC.

Sure. But that doesn't mean you have to completely ignore IRC.

>   tend to identify nicknames in IRC better than 
> voices on phone and I am much better on email personally though.
>
>> 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.

> This is not a reason why people are 
> not contributing. The only thing limited currently is packaging.

But that's what a lot of people probably would be interested in. Well,
work is on the way to change that, so no need to discuss this much wider.

>> 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.
> I guess we could speculate on the reasons but active development didnt 
> happen. A good way to actual fix things would be get involved. Live CD 
> is very much a priority for us in the current development release cycle. 
> If this involves getting someone in Red Hat to do that everytime, that 
> might slow down progress.

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.

>> 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.
> 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

>> 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?
> 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.

> We wont be pushing everything as updates.

I didn't request that. Seems you don't want to hear me on that, too.

> We 
> need to maintain quality for the release and updates. Major updates of a 
> new release of GNOME have higher chances of regressions when pushed out 
> as updates.

That why I want out schedule to be aligned with Gnome.

>>>> 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.
> Sure. There is a reason it is called experimental.  [...]

I'd call what happend there "the maintainer baked it once and then
forget about that". Give FESCo free hand to revamp "Fedora Alternatives"
and Ill show you that the community can do better.

>>> [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.
> 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.

> we wouldnt be able to accomodate all these 
> in the same release and not within updates either. They would have wait 
> for the next release.
>
>> Ignoring the opinion from the community won't help building a community
>> around Fedora.
> We are trying to solve the bigger problem instead.

And you keep the community out.

>>> 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).
> Yes and that got fixed only because some people in the community decided 
> to act on it and do something about it themselves.

I know. That worked. Fedora could be so much better and ahead of our
competitors if Red Hat would help with the birth of some stuff a bit
more. That part of the reasons why I started this thread.

> Thats what we need 
> more of.

I don't see that happening with the current attitude.

CU
thl