Board efforts: scope, concept, and permission?

[Kevin Kofler]

Mike McGrath wrote:
> Then no one is actually using our products.  People don't use spins after
> they install them.  After install they're all pointed at the same thing.
> I'm a KDE user but I'm not using a KDE spin right now.

Then you're missing out on some of the integration work we do. That said, 
I'm fairly confident *you* know what stuff to install and what to remove to 
get a decent KDE after a DVD install / netinstall / "some other spin" 
install, but the average user will end up with a suboptimal KDE if they 
install from anything other than the KDE spin.

> The above bullets say to me more then ever the spins are harming Fedora
> and not helping it.  They're a place for us to focus, spend time, QA,
> hosting, etc, and at the end of the day gain absolutely nothing.  Let the
> KDE sig focus on the KDE related packages and experience and not some
> crappy spin that no one who is reading this email right now is actually
> using.

Both my machines were installed from the KDE spin. And I take offense at you 
calling it "crappy", we work a lot on it (especially our live image 
maintainer, Sebastian Vahl, does, but we all participate). It's also what we 
primarily test. A live image is perfect for testing, just burn it and boot 
from it, or boot it in a VM, and you immediately see what works and what 
doesn't work. It's also great for users to install, you get a known-working 
packageset with the basic desktop environment (e.g. KDE Plasma Desktop) and 
all the basic apps on it and then you add the additional apps you want.

And in addition, if you want us to focus more on the installer-based spins 
(DVD, multi-CD set, netinstall), you need to solve (or get somebody else to 
solve) the "comps is biased towards GNOME" problem: all the groups of 
desktop applications, e.g. "Multimedia / Sound and Video", "Internet 
applications" etc. all default to GNOME apps, sometimes even as mandatory 
entries. To make the installer useful for our purposes, we'd need Anaconda 
to show a desktop selection screen like the one in the openSUSE installer 
before the package selection screen, then have comps defaults 
conditionalized on the selection made there. Until/unless that happens, we 
cannot recommend the installer-based spins to KDE users.

        Kevin Kofler