Response to "Getting Fedora Out of the If-Then Loop"

[Máirín Duffy]

On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 22:12 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Am Freitag, den 19.02.2010, 10:51 -0500 schrieb Josh Boyer:
> > On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 04:40:55PM +0100, Thomas Janssen wrote:
> > >
> > >But i would be interested in what you think what will happen with
> > >Fedora if all the unwanted (it sounds exactly like that to me)
> > >developers leave and Fedora is left behind with only GNOME?
> > >Is that your perfect future?
> > 
> > Why would they leave?
> 
> Because they get little or no support as outlined recently in
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2010-February/013639.html

> First on the spins media: The decision to produce labeled media of the
> LXDE and Xfce spins was made by *all* EMEA ambassadors at the beginning
> of last november because at events we usually present not only GNOME and
> KDE but also LXDE and Xfce. 

The ambassadors may well have made a decision in November, 
but they sure as heck did not communicate that decision to the design team in
a timely manner. We produced the same set of
media labels we've always produced at the time we were allocated to
in the widely-published design team schedule. I even made a blog
post asking people if there was anything we were forgetting or
needed to add, and no ambassadors spoke up for lxde and xfce there:

http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/getting-ready-for-f12-media-sleeves-and-labels/

We did not get a request until the week before the Christmas holidays [1],
a month after the media labels were planned to be completed and at a 
time when many of the design team members were resting after the
hecticness of churning out the massive amount of work we always churn
out right before a major release (F12). Work was produced after the Christmas holidays
that was completely acceptable with respect to the standard formats we produce
the media in. However, for some reason you felt the need to add desktop
branding to the media (the design team has consciously chosen NOT to do this and I 
personally believe it's a terrible idea) and generally stray away from the standard 
template we have been using for three releases now. Oh, and you didn't mention that you
wanted those changes to the standard format until we had already invested time and
effort into producing what you actually did ask for.

Not only that! The sources to all the media labels we originally produced were available,
from November on, so there was no reason to wait until the night before you needed the labels to
start trying to work them out on your own!

In conclusion, your posting that you site is in NO WAY evidence of a 'little or no support' for
spins. It's more evidence that:

1) the design team needs help and needs to be treated more like human beings rather than robots. 
the time around a release is the most stressful and demanding time for us.

2) you need to be more explicit in what you are looking for when you make a request rather than
waste a designer's time putting something together for you, only for you to reject it because she 
couldn't read your mind and you never clearly explained what you were asking for

3) don't make your initial request a month late! be understanding when youmake your requests right before 
a major international holiday! 

4) realize any request you make of the design team that falls within calendar vicinity of a Fedora 
release is not going to be high-priority because the team's highest-priority deliverables are
the release artwork. The plan outlining the release artwork happens months in advance and is aligned
to an extremely tight schedule. Since these labels were clearly not on that plan, they were treated 
accordingly.

One team you really need to refrain from picking on as an example of some
conspiratorial anti-spins agenda is the design team. We have never, ever turned down a 
request on the basis of who made it or for what team within the project it was for, and
the spins.fpo site, especially the games spin site which was a huge effort
almost everyone on the team contributed to (we did over 100 designs, one for each of 
the individual games in the spin), was a huge project we took on over top of
the usual release artwork deliverables we are responsible for. That was to
directly benefit the spins!

~m

[1] https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/111