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

Christoph Wickert christoph.wickert at googlemail.com
Sat Feb 20 19:37:32 UTC 2010


Am Freitag, den 19.02.2010, 14:33 -0800 schrieb Jesse Keating:

> It was my understanding that spins were going to be a serve yourself
> kind of thing.  

This applies to so many things in Fedora. You can do what you like, but
don't expect any support. So Thomas' question was right: Why would
people continue contributing to Fedora if they are just tolerated but
not supported?

> As stated, there is only so many resources to go around,
> and in order to provide 9!! spin flavors, you're not going to get
> anything out of releng other than running the command to make the image
> show up and shoving it over to the torrent server.

Yesterday I already said I don't want 9 other spins but only for the
alternative desktops LXDE and Xfce. Why do I think that these spins are
more important than the others? It's not because these are "my" spins
but because:
      * the selection of the desktop is something users consider before
        they install. On the other hand I doubt they think about the
        games or the design apps they want to have in advance. So the
        desktop spins are fundamentally different from say the games
        spin or FEL (which is hosted at alt.fp.o btw).
      * although Xfce and LXDE are already in anaconda when you have an
        internet connection, you cannot just select one and go. Instead
        you have to select a custom package selection and uncheck all
        the GNOME defaults and select your favorite apps. Otherwise the
        result is not much different from the desktop spin because all
        the GNOME stuff is pulled in as dependencies. As long as we
        don't have a smarter installer, we *need* these spins.

Wait, what about Moblin and Sugar?
      * Sugar is a very specialized desktop that only works properly on
        certain hardware. Although I contribute to sugar too, I don't
        consider it a complete desktop environment.
      * Moblin is no spin but a remix, so it's a completely different
        situation. The current Moblin is GNOME based and shares a lot of
        apps with the desktop spin. Nobody knows what the future of
        MeeGo will look like, so it's not very wise to advocate it ATM.

Anyway, the direct downloads were just one example of what I consider
proper support for the spins community. I was told that we don't have
the resources to host them several times, but so far nobody named any
numbers.

Regards,
Christoph



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