KDE vs. GNOME on F10

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 15:49 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> On 08/05/2009 03:41 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > The missing bit of the argument from before is whether we actually want
> > to care about people who only want 'stable' updates, and that tracks
> > back to the question of what Fedora actually is, which I don't believe
> > the Board has settled yet. If we don't care about providing a stable
> > update set, then implementing this system would be unnecessary work, and
> > it's fine to continue simply to have a single repo and allow adventurous
> > updates to be sent there.
> 
> See, this is different. If you're waiting for the board to define "what 
> Fedora actually is", you're going to die waiting. I'm of the opinion 
> that such a question is too broad and vague.

> Now, if you wanted to know how the board feels about providing "a stable 
> updates set", and you can elaborate on what that means and how it works, 
> with less handwaving and miracles, I think we could give a more 
> productive and useful answer. *

I think they're the same question. I've explained why before, but here
we go again.

The question is whether Fedora intends to be a distribution suitable for
day-to-day general purpose use by people who are not necessarily that
interested in Fedora per se - whether it's got an aim to be a
general-purpose operating system like other distributions do - or not.
That's the only framework in which you can sensibly answer whether we
want a stable update set or not, to my mind.

If we are - or _want to be_ - that kind of a distribution, we have to
provide a stable update set so we can stop telling people who just want
a distro to run Aunt Flo's desktop or their webserver or whatever on to
run CentOS or Ubuntu instead. If, however, we really don't care about
that kind of usage scenario and instead we want to focus only on being a
kind of project for the prototyping of systems that will eventually
_become_ components of that kind of generally usable operating system -
which to my mind is more or less the status at the moment - it doesn't
make any sense to provide a stable update set, it's not serving any real
purpose, and it'd just be a waste of effort.

I really can't see any more 'specialized' framework in which to address
the question. Whether it makes sense to provide a solely stable update
set or not is inevitably tied to who would use such a set, and that in
turn inevitably ties back to exactly what kind of Fedora user we want,
and that in turn is inextricably linked to the identity of Fedora as a
project.

If you can break that chain at any point, please do, otherwise I'm
struggling to divorce the issues :)

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net