Summary/Minutes for Wednesday's FESCo meeting (2012-12-05)

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 4:28 AM, Vít Ondruch <vondruch at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> Alternately, "Feature" could be the term for the any small or big thing
>>> which is useful to track and tout for marketing purposes, and big
>>> technical
>>> changes could be, I dunno... "Major Changes".
>>
>> The meeting minutes showed that Fedora Marketing is already filtering
>> the current Feature list and picking the important ones to highlight, so
>> I don't think continuing to call the small ones Features is accurate.
>>
>> I mean, sure it could be done but it seems to make more sense to change
>> the name of the small ones instead.  Or just have them go to release
>> notes.  The main point is, calling them all the same thing is confusing
>> and leads to a basically useless "Feature list".
>>
> Feature is something somebody considers important enough to create feature
> page for it. Period.

We're going to disagree on this point.  It's OK that we disagree.

> I am not sure why do you want to categorize it by size and impact, when it
> will be autocategorized by feedback on ML. The only think matters is that
> the Feature is widely advertised and that the community can provide early
> feedback. Please avoid bureaucracy. I would realy hate to see something like
> FFCo (Fedora Feature Committee), which would decided if feature is feature,
> major change, alteration, evolution or disruption, since it really doesn't
> matter.

It doesn't matter from a "get this thing into Fedora" standpoint.  It
very much matters from a marketing/communication standpoint.  If it
didn't matter, Fedora Marketing wouldn't be picking specific items out
of the overall Feature list.

The example I used in the meeting (which btw you should really go read
the full logs at this point because all I'm doing is repeating myself)
is that if you give a tech journalist a list of 10 Features, they can
write a pretty decent article about what is coming in the next Fedora
release.  If you give them a list of 20-30 Features, they're either
going to ignore you entirely or pick 10 Features they think are worth
writing about.

Some Features are more important than others.  I want FESCo involved
in reviwing the ones that are big, have an impact across the distro,
are somewhat controversial, and have the potential to require a lot of
coordination.  Whatever we call those, that is what I want reviewed.

josh