"What is the Fedora Project?"

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 21:11:41 -0700,
  John Poelstra <poelstra at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> (a) Define a target audience for the Fedora distribution (or maybe
> narrow the definition to "default spin")--without a clear target
> audience for our product there is a lack of clarity around when we
> are "done."  It also makes it difficult to make decisions about
> release quality and release composition.

I am a project member that is interested in system adminstration, network
administration and games. I also believe that free software is a better
way to create software in many cases, especially for (software)
infrastructure. Fedora is a very good fit for me.

I am currently the maintainer for the Games Spin, the colossus and glest
packages. My initial interest in becoming a developer was related to trying
to get colossus packaged to add it into a custom games spin. I got side
tracked into first becoming the Games Spin maintainer because when I asked
some questions about problems building a livedvd with the existing Games
Spin KS file people said we need a Games Spin maintainer and you should
volunteer. I mention this story because I have seen people in this thread
say you can't control volunteer developers. I disagree. For at least some
subset of Fedora's project members there is more in Fedora that they could
work on then they have time to do. (See also the Josh Boyer case.) These
people are likely to respond to leadership that says such and such areas of
the project are more important than others. That certainly applies to me.

I think that we want to target people who have a reasonable chance to
become contributors (whether that's code, art, documentation, process
management or whatever). Acquiring new users has a cost, particularly
acquiring ones for which "just works" overrides free and patent unencumbered.
More new users means more questions and more downloads. We want this offset
by something else. Maybe it is in people becoming contributors or maybe
it is in terms of sponsors giving the project money, hardware or network
bandwidth.

> (b) Set some broad goals for where we want the Fedora Distirbution
> to look like a few release from now--say when Fedora 15 is released.
> What should those be?

I wish that the graphics cards would get more support. This is an area where
I can't help much other than to file bug reports. This impacts me personally
in making the Games Spin harder to test and less functional and prevents
me from playing some games. I think this also hurts us with the "just works"
crowd. Unlike the situation with codecs this is something we can do something
about in the short run. Things are slowly changing, but it would be nice if
it happened faster.

> (c) Set some broad goals for where we want the Fedora Fedora Project
> to look like a few release from now--say when Fedora 15 is released.
> What should those be?

I would like to see more direction set. I would like it to be easier to
find out where help is needed. On the packager side this information seems
to be generic. Though there are some wish lists out there (for example for
games that people would like packaged) there are priorities attached to
them. Maybe there already is better information for other areas of the
project.

> (d) Set a goal of five things we believe should be improved or fixed
> by the release of Fedora 13 that will make the Fedora Distribution a
> better product or the Fedora Project a stronger community.  What
> should those things be?

I think that with some additional resources the graphics situation could
be much better. While the radeon and intel drivers will probably be pretty
good by F13, I would be surprised if the nouveau driver had 3D enabled
in F13 with the current development pace.

I'd like to see some more resources devoted to leadership in the Spins SIG.
kararip is spread pretty thin and for various reasons none of the other
regulars seems interested in assuming larger roles in that group. For myself
I want to develop test cases for QA for the Games Spin.