[fab] State of Fedora (a long email)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi,

Max, many thanks for your mail and your (and the Boards) work on Fedora.
I know, my mail was quite a bit of a rant, but I hope thats okay now and
then.

I don't want to start yet another long discussion, but I think I should
comment on some parts of your mail as I'm part of the reasons why it was
 written.

Max Spevack schrieb:
> [....]
> One of the things that is true about Fedora is that this 
> fedora-advisory-board email list is *THE PLACE* where the interesting 
> Fedora conversations are had.  Far more so than any phone calls that the 
> Board has. The most important business is conducted on this list.

Agreed, at that's a good thing.

> [....]
> The choice to have those meetings on the phone, as opposed to on IRC, was 
> one that was made by the Board when we started up, the main reason being 
> the ones that Paul stated -- phone calls are higher bandwidth, and the 
> idea is to get everyone in that call on the same page as quickly as 
> possible.  If the Board wants to change its meeting "mechanism" I don't 
> have a problem with that.  It can be put up to discussion/vote in our next 
> meeting (tomorrow).

Just to clarify: I think phone meetings are fine (well, I don't like
them much, but I don't have to participate in those from the Board (-;
), but having some kind of open meetings on IRC now and then or have a
kind of "consulting-hour" might be something nice in addition (and no,
not all members need to participate in that "consulting-hour", but at
least three or four should).

> [...]
> Like the rest of you, I prefer to see the big decisions made on-list, 
> where there are public archives and anyone in the Fedora community can 
> participate.

Well, this list is invitation only, fedora-devel is much to noisy. I'm
*wondering* if we should have some kind of "fedora-project-discussions"
mailinglist, where any member of cla_done in the accounts system can
participate (or even all? maybe moderated?).

> The Fedora Board is not meant to be a bottleneck -- it's meant to be a 
> guide.  Some of the places in the thread from last week mentioned that the 
> Board should involve itself more into decisions.  I don't know about that

Site note to that: Involve does not have to mean make the decisions for
the sub-projects. It could guide here now and then, especially on big
tasks (e.g. ask "Can we help with to get foo take off/realized?") or if
the project isn't working properly (e.g. like Legacy currently). Also
mediating between the different sub-projects maybe could help here and
there.

> -- there's been several cases where the Board has stepped in in the last 
> few months and "made a decision" about some topic, but those were only 
> situations in which it seemed like the folks who were closest to those 
> decisions had reached an impasse.
> 
> I don't necessarily like the idea of the Board just swooping in and 
> declaring things about certain projects that already have their own 
> leadership in place.  That's not what we're meant to do, and that's not 
> how we're operating.

Agreed in general -- but currently it's not possible for community
members to influence our biggest sub-project (Core) and maybe that was
one of the reasons why I asked for above. A proper "Fedora Core Steering
Committee" with community members could help to silence that wish.

> [...]
> FEDORA SUMMIT
> =============
> [...]
> We will also make it a priority to have an IRC channel open on Mon, Tue, 
> and Wed that people can be a part of, in which we will do our best to 
> "broadcast" what we are discussing at any time.

<participating_in_the_fedora__project_is_also_meant_to_be_fun_now_and_then>
What about the evening sessions? Will there be some beer, Tequilla
Sunrise and Apple-juice available on IRC in the evenings after the hard
work is done?
</participating_in_the_fedora__project_is_also_meant_to_be_fun_now_and_then>

> We'll also do an "end of day" summary like Karsten asked for, and publish 
> as complete a transcript of what's going on as we can manage.

Nice, many thx.

> OTHER TOPICS
> ============
> [...]
> - Desktop usability (acroread, java, flash, etc.)
>  	This is the post controversial topic of all.  Greg and I have been 
> spending a lot of time on this.  It's a further topic for the Fedora Board 
> and Fedora Summit.

My 2 cents on that: Let the Fedora Unity project handle that in a
special sub-project, but help them to get it realized -- It's simply
much easier for someone at redhat.com to get an answer when knocking on
Adobe's/Sun's door and asking "may we ship your product in a add-one yum
repo named foo".

> [...]
> FINAL THOUGHTS
> ==============
> 
> Reading through all of those emails, the one thing that really struck me 
> and made me think was the comment that "everything in Fedora takes a long 
> time."
> 
> I agree.  And I hate it.  But I don't know how to fix it, other than just 
> by continuing to push through barriers when they come up.

Well, my 2 cents: I sometimes think the Fedora Project and it's
sub-projects could need a bit of more support by Red Hat/someone that
gets payed for that work. It's probably not that much that is missing,
and I think just one person could help it a lot as long as he isn't
assimilated into the internal Red Hat collective ^w machinery ^w
workflow to much (but enough to get things realized).

(And just for completeness: That might sound as I wanted to do that job
-- maybe somewhen in the future I might be interested in that, but
currently I'm quite happy with my present job).

>  If I sit back 
> and try to evaluate the work that I have done since I took the job of 
> "Fedora Project Leader" back in mid February, I certainly don't think I'd 
> give myself top marks.  I think I've done a good, but by no means 
> fantastic job.

I think you did a good job and things are evolving. That takes time (I
invested quite some time in this discussion and should wanter off again
to get the work in Extras-land done -- there is also still so much to do).

> [some insight to Max's thoughts]

As I said: Many thanks for your work. It is much appreciated.

> Anyway, I hope this email has answered some of the major topics from this 
> list the last few days. [...]

It did for me. Thanks for summing them up.

CU
thl