FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424
Matthew Garrett
mjg at redhat.com
Thu Apr 30 23:48:09 UTC 2009
On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 03:33:28PM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> Remember kids, we probably shouldn't be listening to you. Red Hat
> Desktop == Smart. You == Dumb.
The problem with the desktop is that it's obvious, looks simple and
everyone has an opinion on it. But not all of these opinions are equally
valid. This kind of situation is much easier to deal with in, say, the
kernel VM system - in that case it would be perfectly acceptable for
people who spend their entire working lives concentrating on a specific
topic to say that they know better than people who occasionally touch
upon it.
The real question is whether we believe that the people who spend their
lives working on the Fedora desktop have a better understanding of the
issues than people who don't. I've disagreed with various decisions
they've made, and in some cases argued quite strongly. I've then often
discovered that they've done significantly more research than I have,
have carefully considered the issues that I thought were blindingly
obvious and have come to a conclusion based on the work that they've
done. In the majority of cases I've ended up agreeing with their
position. These aren't dictators who change software behaviour on a
whim. They're professionals who are doing their very best to make the
Fedora desktop a modern and usable system. And so it's entirely
unsurprising if they become upset at being told by a group of people who
*don't* work in that field that they're wrong, in the same way that I'd
end up pretty furious if FESCO overruled me on a power management issue
ten days after we passed final freeze.
It's not about smart versus dumb. If we trust these people then we have
to assume that in most cases they *will* know better than people who
argue against them on mailing lists. And if we don't trust them then
there's something pretty fundamentally wrong with the way we're
producing this distribution.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org
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