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

[Máirín Duffy]

On Sat, 2010-02-20 at 00:08 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> So why did nobody from the design team speak up when I filed the ticket?
> If you expect the ambassadors to communicate their request in a timely
> manner, then you should do the same.

It doesn't work like that. *You* were the one asking for something, not
us.

> > and generally stray away from the standard 
> > template we have been using for three releases now. 
> 
> I am not a designer, I have no idea what templates or programs you use
> and nobody bothered to tell me.

You certainly didn't bother to ask or RTFM on the wiki.

> > 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.
> 
> Sorry, with due respect: Nobody had done anything, so who invested time?

Tatica did as you already made reference to!

> > 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!
> 
> This just isn't true. as you correctly say the request was opened on
> 2009-12-19. The event we needed the media for was FOSDEM which started
> in 2010-02-06.

You completely missed the point that media artwork was scheduled to
happen in November. I don't care when your event was. We have a set
point in the schedule where we produce all of the media artwork so it is
all consistent and ready well before release date. You missed that date
by a month. 

> > 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
> 
> Tatica and me were in contact most of the time over IRC. She knew what I
> was after and she did a very good job. I only did some small corrections
> as outlined in the ticket.
> 
> The reason to start all over again was that you told me that the SVGs
> created with inkscape wont work because they lack CMYK and we needed to
> start all over again with scribus. So if someone wasted Taticas time I
> don't think it was me.

They don't. Had you brought them to the printers (if they would have
accepted them) they would have come out purple instead of blue. I'm very
sorry it wasn't realized in a timely fashion, but that's orthogonal to
the fact that your initial request was *NOT* upfront wrt what you
needed.

> I'm not sure if this waste could be avoided, but as the ticket was
> assigned to you all the time and copies of all mails go over the
> design-team-tickets mailing list, I think you and others should have
> been aware of it.

There is nobody actively monitoring the design-team-tickets mailing list
as far as I'm aware. What do you want me to do, reply to every ticket,
'too busy, sorry?' If you don't get an answer, there's nobody to do it.
You have to find someone to do it. We have a mailing list advertised on
the front page of the ticket system as the place to ask.

> > 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.
> 
> First you say I was a month late, then you say I should not open a
> ticket close to release. If I opened the ticked at the beginning of
> November when the decision was taken, it would have been just before
> F12. Instead it was opened 2009-12-19 which means F12 was out the door
> for a month and there was no trace of an upcoming release.

The schedule is determined, as I already told you, months in advance of
release. If you had filed the ticket in December and expected those
spins' media labels to be added to the F13 rotation, that would have
been far more reasonable. Having a schedule is the only way we've been
able to make sure stuff gets done, and even then things happen and we
have to leave tasks uncompleted.
> 
> > 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!
> 
> I never said you turned down a turned down a request on the basis of who
> made it, but it is evident that the design team has other priorities
> than the spins. 

The design team has one priority that trumps every other, including the
spins -  the release artwork. I just told you this, and it should be
blaringly obvious anyway. This is NOT a conspiracy against spins. If we
don't have artwork to ship, NONE of the spins have artwork so all
variants of Fedora are negatively impacted. It would be foolish to
produce media artwork for only one or two spins at the detriment of the
theme artwork for all.

> How much time have you spent on gnome-shell recently? A few days? A
> week? But on the other hand there is nobody who has 2 or 3 hours to do
> the spins media?

How dare you call into question what I work on. You have no right to
dictate what I work on or question what I do with my time.

We have almost 200 open requests on our plate of which only the easiest
might take 2-3 hours to work on. Get in line. Also, just because
something doesn't take a long time to do doesn't mean it should be done
first. If we only took on the projects that took the least amount of
time, large more-involved projects like the fpo revamp would NEVER
happen. 

~m