Fedora Board meeting, 2007-01-16, 10AM EST

[Elliot Lee]

On Jan 15, 2007, at 7:03 PM, Max Spevack wrote:

>>> Also want to pick a time during FUDCon for an in-person Board  
>>> meeting. Won't that be so official!  :-)
>>
>> complete with a "...and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" shirt? ;)
>
> DENIED: lack of budget.  You only get a tshirt when your board  
> tenure is over.  And it has to be a tank top.  Elliot, yours is in  
> the mail.  :-)

Wow, I've always wanted a genuine wife-beater... :-)

Now that I'm in the position to get one, here are random thoughts  
from a more distanced perspective:

Fedora Extras amazes me with how much stuff I find already packaged  
in it. For Extras, I think we may overestimate the value of package  
quality and underestimate the value of just having a ton of up-to- 
date packages, but things are definitely going in the right direction.

The biggest headache for me recently has seemed to be hardware  
support. So far, to get my new storage server working half-decently,  
I've had to recompile an lm_sensors chip driver with an experimental  
patch, and download an experimental network driver that works very  
poorly. I think in the past I underestimated the amount of pain  
people go through getting their hardware to work. I wonder if there  
is interest in creating a "Fedora Kernel" sub-project or something,  
to do things like:
	- package up 3rd party drivers
	- improve direct communications with driver developers
	- create a distributed hardware test grid (participants would  
download a nightly LiveCD image, boot it on a system with  
questionable or untested hardware to automatically run a test suite,  
and report the results back)
	- and help with the hardware reporting tool that Fedora  
Infrastructure keeps talking about. (On the other hand, it was so  
cool to plug in a UPS via USB and see the power applet magically show  
up on the GNOME panel.)

The new updates applet & pup are killer, especially having update  
info in the pup list.

In other words, there's still plenty of value to be added by  
perfecting the basic user experience as opposed to branching out in  
huge new directions.

Best,
-- Elliot