FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Kevin Kofler]

Matthew Garrett wrote:
>> Where are the monthly bugfix updates of the entirety of GNOME in the
>> stable updates? Where are the updates to minor feature releases? Oh wait,
>> they don't exist! Yet we provide all this for KDE! We even provide a
>> semi-official unstable repository (at kde-redhat) with the latest beta
>> KDE backported to stable Fedora releases, again where's the equivalent
>> service for GNOME?
> 
> I think you're using the wrong metric here.

I'm just pointing out that we're providing services the GNOME packagers
aren't providing. And those are packaging-level services which I consider
to be an important part of a desktop's user experience on a distro. We
shouldn't forget during all this talk about features that the primary
purpose of Fedora packagers is packaging, not upstream development, and
we're doing a great job at that. Sure, I'd like more Fedora involvement in
upstream KDE development, but upstream development is not primarily what
our SIG is for.

> I work on power management. I think this is an important and worthwhile
> feature, and so I spend a lot of time ensuring that Fedora has
> bleeding-edge power management functionality that sets us apart from
> every other OS. This requires desktop integration. KDE does not have
> that level of power management integration. KDE has, in fact, a power
> management UI that commits almost every single power management error
> possible. If KDE is to be considered equivalent to Gnome, then that
> means we can't say "Fedora has awesome power management". Instead, we're
> limited to saying "Fedora (Gnome spin) has awesome power management".
> That's not a useful way to communicate what we're doing.

Are you really sure that PowerDevil is objectively bad and this it not just
a personal opinion? I don't think the people who work on PowerDevil are
idiots, so they must have had some reason(s) to design the UI the way they
did. And I haven't personally noticed anything obviously bad with
PowerDevil.

> [...] or we need to alter the fedora feature process in such a way that
> features are flagged for the desktops that implement them.

This is obviously the right solution.

> I agree. The multiple years of unpaid work I spent on Debian and Ubuntu
> ought to demonstrate that. I care enough about Fedora that I spend a
> significant amount of time working on it outside my paid hours. Many of
> the contributions I've made to Fedora are entirely out of the scope of
> my job, but I do it because I care about producing an OS that's
> competitive with anything else on the market.

Excellent! So please try not to sound like volunteers' work is somehow
inferior to paid engineers' work.

        Kevin Kofler