[Ambassadors] Re: What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)]

>> Well, we had the intrusion into the servers of the Fedora Project. That
>> is
>> now nearly 4 months ago. I remember to the words of our dear Fedora
>> Project
>> leader, who made us believing with the sentence "We will continue to
>> keep
>> the Fedora community notified of any updates." - but nothing happend
>> after
>> that. We all are still waiting for final report about the intrusion into
>> the servers of the Fedora Project! Yes, we can: Open Source, but
>> unluckily
>> no Open Communication! Even the communication during the intrusion time
>> was
>> worse, e-mails to the Infrastructure team and to our Fedora Project
>> leader
>> got not really answered (or just when reasking and bugging) when asking
>> for
>> the issue and details even when it was mostly clear, that we're no
>> longer
>> really men about ourself - the intrusion.
>
> I have no firsthand knowledge of this beyond what anybody else does.
> However, there is likely still an investigation ongoing into what
> happened. As such, it would be inappropriate to share information
> about it until law enforcement is complete with their work (which they
> are not known to be fast about), and the lawyers say what's OK to
> share without spoiling any possible litigation.

How do we know there is still an ongoing investigation ? To me, it looks
like everything is fine, but we never were said it was.

If an investigation is still ongoing, then a regular communication should
be made, even if it only repeats each time "the investigation is still
ongoing". Really, I totally agree with Robert here, the communication
about this "issue" was (and still is) awful.

About the legal constraints, I can totally understand that RedHat (the
private company) has to keep some informations. But in that case, RedHat
engineers should take over the issue and no one in Fedora should be aware
of it. Right now, we're in some kind of middle stage where only an elit of
Fedora people can be in the secret, and others are being despised. This
doesn't make a healthy community.

>> Our German translation is only quantitative, not qualitative. And the
>> worse
>> thing is, the team leader of the German translation team finds the
>> current
>> position and its current status okay. That's wrong and never should
>> happen.
>> If a German person is not able to understand the context of a translated
>> sentence, the phrase should not be commited. Many people are even not
>> re-
>> reading the tsentence whether it has any meaning after the translation.
>> But
>> our team leader says, quantitative translation is okay. Ugly grammar and
>> spelling issues are another thing; seems too much to re-read or to use a
>> spellchecker before commiting - our teamleader says, that everything
>> must
>> fast go to upstream...great! I now know lots of German speaking people
>> (in
>> their mother tongue), which use Fedora only in English - including
>> myself -
>> to avoid the must of reading that horrible German. Surely, we can fix
>> that,
>> but if always people are working against, that does not help. Unluckily,
>> language translations don't make it that often into Fedora updates
>> during
>> the lifetime of a Fedora release. So mostly, a broken translation is
>> kept
>> there for the whole release. But it's okay to be only quantitative and
>> not
>> qualitative, our team leader of the German translation project prays.
>
> Unfortunately, I am one of those people that only speaks American
> English. However, if I were German and being forced to read phrases
> that I didn't understand because they were translated poorly, I'd
> attempt to correct the translation. If the local leader feels this is
> OK, I would take the matter to FLSCo, and attempt to assume the leader
> role yourself (if you have the time and desire to do so).  If you
> don't have the time, find someone else who shares your views, and work
> with them.

I don't know if that's already possible (pardon me if it is), but we
should be able to report translation mistakes as bugs, on our Bugzilla.
This way, the FLSCo could be automatically noticed, as well as people from
QA who would then be aware that some leader is not willing to improve
quality over time (the problem is not that we suck, but not improving is).

>> CD which we're now promoting at our download page better and more that
>> the
>> installation DVD, is IMHO not a good store sign as it is just slow. It
>> even
>> has not a localisation - folks, not the whole world is speaking english,
>
> I agree that this is unfortunate, and also note that Ubuntu does a
> better job than we do in this area, with a menu to select the language
> when booting the Live CD. Maybe something that could be worked on.  If
> you have experience, feel free to pitch in! I've not engaged in a
> comparison between the Ubuntu Live CD and ours, however I'm assuming
> that they sacrifice a lot of functionality on the Live CD in order to
> have room for the various languages. Everything is a trade-off,
> unfortunately.

I'm afraid I don't really understand this issue. To me, all languages were
present on the liveCD. Last time I checked, you could chose your language
/ keyboard on the GDM screen.

That's exactly what we did in fact for our fr_FR live Media: Nicolas
Chauvet used a special rpmmacro to tell RPM to install only the french
language of each package (and obviously the default one in case there is
no translation available). IIRC, he told me that the default Fedora Live
Media (~700MB) was reduced about half only doing this. This allowed us to
put OOo and other great apps on our spin that is not present on the
official one for space issues.

>> just there is America on the worldmap! I know people from fairs, which
>> are
>> really frusted by their first try with a Live CD as it was just English.
>> Yes, we maybe can create a spin, but these ones, we cannot offer on the
>> FTP
>> and HTTP mirrors, because Fedora is already too big. On the other hand,
>> the
>
> What can be offered is a torrent, not ideal but better than nothing.

What we do is that we have our own infrastructure for the french speaking
community (forum, documentation, our own web server, etc...). So we have a
torrent tracker on that server for downloading our spins.

A local community like the German one should be able to do the same.
Smaller local communities could get in touch with bigger ones that or not
too far away to ask for help on those matters.

>> Yeah, Anaconda got a bigger rewrite for Fedora 10 and took care of the
>> old
>> and often claimed issue, that the user needs to know the URL of a mirror
>> in
>> order to install Fedora via netinstall. But now, the screen got
>> completely
>> ripped out or is (if it really still exists, which I don't believe) too
>> good hidden somewhere. Instead of that, somebody - that must have been
>> an
>> American - made the "repo=" option for the command line prompt if
>> somebody
>> wants to specify a local mirror. Urgs! At that point, no non-US keyboard
>> layout is loaded! I now have to type something like
>> "repoßhttpö--my.local-
>> mirror-fedora-something-" or so on my non-US keyboard. Folks, the
>> worldmap
>> not only has American people with a US keyboard layout out there, even
>> if
>> some people think so. Even the "repo=xxx" is worse documented, but yes,
>> who
>> cares? Just me as it seems somehow...
>
> I certainly don't think that, even though I'm an American.  This
> really falls into the area of usability and QA.  Most of our QA
> contributors are in the US, and I didn't have as much time as I would
> have liked this time around due to $DAYJOB constraints.  However, my
> local mirror is set up in MirrorManager, such that it gets delivered
> to me first in mirrorlists, so I likely wouldn't have noticed this
> anyway, unfortuantely.

Didn't experienced this issue, but I have my own one that is _very_
problematic in F10's Anaconda. However, that's not the place to discuss it
so I'll just open a bug report once I can narrow it ;)

>> PackageKit, another broken software which is in a pre-bleeding edge
>> state I
>
> Again, I can't really comment on this except for the last part.  We
> are not wanting to "beat" Ubuntu to anything - there's not an arms
> race here or anything like that.  We are simply normally the first to
> adopt

Do not mistake PackageKit and it's graphical front-end. Most of your (and
a lot of PK detractors') complaints about PK are in fact about
Gnome-PackageKit. PackageKit is a great tool with excellent features in
se. But yes, it definitely needs some love on the front-end part. That's
where the guys from Ubuntu could help us a lot if they were wiling to
adopt PK. They have a good (IMHO) experience on usability and ergonomy
stuff.

>> When talking about PackageKit, DBUS is another issue. The recent DBUS
>> pkg
>> update broke PackageKit stuff - thanks to our cool QA. And clever as we
>
> Unfortunately I don't think that I can tell from bodhi what the
> initial request for this particular update was, testing or stable.  I
> suspect stable, since it was a security update, and it was pushed
> within 2 hours of the update being submitted.  Therefore, there was no
> opportunity for QA. However, QA is an area where we are desperately
> lacking resources. Help is welcome there.

Couldn't we have something implemented in Bohdi that refuses an update if
all depending packages were not rebuilt for this particular update ?

This already happens with some Firefox updates. And this is not IMHO a QA
/ packager issue. Packagers are human, and human is fallible. There should
be some automatic protection against those problems. (I know, great idea,
but where is the code ? Well, not everyone with ideai is a good programmer
I fear)

>> Plymouth is nice - sometimes. Why did we put so much effort into that?
>> It
>> does not work with many graphic cards and it doesn't make things really
>> faster for me. You also forgot to put a message somewhere, that hitting
>> ESC
>
> Please file a bug about that and see where it goes.

Do not misktake things. Plymouth is a graphical frontend to make booting
sequence more eye-candy.

Making boot faster was a completely different feature in F10 Feature
process. The only thing that could speed up the boot regarding Plymouth is
the KMS (which is different but needed for a graphical Plymouth) as it
allows to get rid of the "blinks" between the boot sequence and the GDM
screen. But hey, how many seconds does it wastes ? 1 ? 2 ? And again,
that's KMS, not Plymouth.

>> Fedora EMEA e.V. also seems to be a mostly dead tree. Of course we have
>> founded the association as legal vehicle. But it would be nice to see
>> where
>
> Interesting, I thought that it was going well.  Perhaps you should ask
> FAmSCo to enlighten us here?

I haver the same issue with EMEA as Robert. I'm french, we have our own
association (and had it before the creation of EMEA). Our fee is 20€. EMEA
is 128€. Guess which one I (and each and every french people) adhered to ?

About them not being transparent enough, I must admit that I didn't try to
interest myself about what they are doing, mainly because I will not
adhere to it as long as the fee is so prohibitively high. For now, they
are (to me) only a way to acquire really nice poloshirts (and thank you
Joerg for taking care of that :)

Regards,


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Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)
French Fedora Ambassador

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"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~Benjamin Franklin