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

Robyn Bergeron robyn.bergeron at gmail.com
Fri Feb 19 22:26:41 UTC 2010


2010/2/19 Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org>:
> 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

Just to put my $.02 in here (this thread must be worth at least $50-60
bucks by now :D) -  WRT to the points Máirín made, in addition to this
comment on the cited page...

 * Little support by marketing: Was there ever done any marketing for the spins?

Marketing cannot be everywhere at once.  Like Design, we take
requests.  Like the Design team, we are human, and things can be
missed, we can be busy.  Like the Design team, and most other teams,
unless we don't like sleeping, we cannot possibly read every single
email that comes across every single mailing list.  If you feel we are
not doing something, for the love, come talk to us! Come to one of the
marketing meetings, hit up the mailing list, file a request in the
marketing trac queue.  We're not being neglectful or spiteful; we just
didn't know.  (Well, in my case, I didn't know. I don't speak for my
fellow marketing friends.)

It seems like there is a definite disconnect on what needs to be done
as far as timing, scheduling, etc for the spins, at least from reading
this.  Fedora gets pumped out every 6 months because we operate on a
tight, well-defined schedule.  It seems like sitting down and defining
what a timeline might be for doing these things for a spin would be a
good idea, particularly if we can define how it would work in relation
to the overall Fedora schedule.

Workflow is a good thing. Defining it and publishing it is even
better.  If others feel that this is a definite, ongoing problem, then
we should resolve it together, not point fingers at each other.


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