Suggestion Next Release

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Sun Mar 23 01:00:44 UTC 2008


On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 3:44 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at>
wrote:

> Because upstream GNOME has repeatedly refused to make that change, they
> were
> even reluctant to expose that option in the UI, now they did that, but
> that was
> as far as they wanted to go.
>
> As for changing the default in Fedora, as the ones responsible for the
> Fedora
> GNOME packages are, or at least used to be, the same ones who made the
> upstream
> decision, good luck there too!
>

Either you make a persuasive argument to change the default and get it
changed across the board, or we learn to live with it.  I'm not happy about
seeing Fedora branding spread 7000 images over all possible combinations of
default settings just because we have the tools to make it drop dead easy to
do.   Just because its easy to do, doesn't mean its appropriate.

I consider this sort of stuff as downstream patch aggregation....which is
something we are suppose to be avoiding.  And these sorts of changes are
completely orthogonal to issues of needed changes for localization
variants.  These sorts of changes are arbitrary personal preferences that
are being changed because people are in disagreement with upstream.  If we
want to have officially localized variants, then I think its reasonable to
expect the people looking to pass off their localized derivatives
distributions as Fedora images stay as close as possible to the
non-localized Desktop spin. Making arbitrary changes to defaults, just
because you can, dilutes the Fedora brand.  If people working on localized
spins don't show some reasonable restraint on applying arbitrary changes, we
aren't going to see officially localized spins...ever... because there will
be no commonality between default behavior across images and that just isn't
going to fly.

If you want to make arbitrary customizations to the defaults and release
that as a distribution, because you think you know better than upstream,
fine go right ahead. I'm not going to try to stop you.  You have the
infinite freedom to do what you want because we've made the tools possible
for you to do it.  But please don't ask it to be call Fedora.  Because
Fedora as a project needs to continue to work with upstream...even in
situations where individual Fedora contributors personally disagree about
what the default setting should be.  We need the Fedora images we release to
behave consistently.

-jef
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