Fedora Board Strategic Working Group

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 03:52:52PM -0500, Max Spevack wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Mike McGrath wrote:
> 
> > The funny thing here is I think spins are a detriment to Fedora.  We 
> > pretend they're useful and interesting but they're really not.  If we 
> > describe them as "a subset of what is in the Everything/ directory" 
> > which is what they are, they're not at all compelling.
> 
> If spins are *only* a subset of stuff in Everything/ that can still 
> compose a funtioning OS, then yeah, they aren't really that compelling, 
> since it's basically just a customized package manifest.  You could get 
> to the same result with two yum commands.
> 
> The question is whether or not we've seen any innovations come into 
> existence as a result of different spins -- which allow people to have 
> smaller set of focus that are still useful for them -- or whether or not 
> having a Fedora $FOO spin has been useful from a Marketing point of 
> view.
> 
> Chitlesh has had a lot of success with the Fedora Electronics Lab spin 
> that would probably not have otherwise happened.
> 
> The KDE SIG and the KDE Spin has, over the past few years, also been 
> very successful.
> 
> I have always thought that a "Fedora Crazy Experimental" spin -- which 
> allows folks who want to try to build an OS without a firewall, or with 
> some crazy-different version of a critical package -- and came with tons 
> of warning lights and a marketing drive that associated it with the 
> truly bleeding-edge, playing-with-a-revoluntionary-idea kinds of people 
> could lead to some interesting proof of concepts, or could be used as a 
> way to make a hypothetical and flame-ridden argument on 
> fedora-devel-list into something that is tangible and can be evaluated 
> for real, is a valuable sort of thing.

As a spin, this seems problematic to me.  Even though we produce a ton
of written material already for every release, with the dedicated
efforts of a great group of people in the Fedora Marketing and
Documentation teams as well as the contributors who help and support
them, there are lots of people who don't read important information
about the general release.  If a release like this changed some
behavior in a critical package like the kernel, glibc, or yum, it
could potentially create some significant issues for triagers,
developers, and maintainers.

No reason this couldn't be done as a Fedora Remix, however.

> I'd like to ask Christoph Wickert whether the existence of the Spins 
> idea -- even if it's just an acknowledged friendliness in Fedora to Lots 
> Of New Ideas -- helped to make the LXDE work that has been happening a 
> reality, or if they would have gotten to the same place in the same 
> amount of time without Spins.

It would also be interesting to hear from the LXDE upstream.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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