[Ambassadors] Re: Fedora print magazine proposal from Linux Pro Magazine

[David Nalley]

Inline reply:

> but the more that I thought about things today...
> The more reasons I came up with from an Ambassador's point of view
> that we should wait for F13 -
>
> 1) Dracut being new -- would love to have it have a dry run in with
> public to work out any bugs if any..
>     -- I feel that any glitches in any other area other than the boot
> process/Install can always be worked out in the update process but for
> boot/install if I was a user new or not if the install did not work
> out I would not go online (if I was able to, not primary computer) and
> find out if there are workarounds I would just reinstall the previous
> OS that i know that works...(Of course I really do not know allot
> about Anaconda or Dracut so excuse me if I am speaking incorrectly.)

This is true of virtually every Fedora release - we are always pushing
the edge a bit further out. For instance, with F11, the storage
section of anaconda was rewritten., F9 moved from sysvinit to upstart,
and a new version of X.org.  F12 has dracut. There is never likely to
be a Fedora release where something foundational isn't changed in some
earth shattering way.

>
> 2) F12 would release '2009-11-10'  this being the date for us in the
> NorthWest (US) and I think most of the world would be a tough time to
> do Release party's (Thanks Giving, Christmas, weather)  but F13 would
> be great so we could ALL work together to make well coordinated
> release party's around the world to coincide with the publication of
> the Magazine even give some magazines (4-5) away possibly as SWAG even
> run blurbs in Newspapers 'Fedora 13 as seen in book stores in Linux
> Pro Magazine Special Edition'. or whatever..(this being a LP magazine
> release I just think we should give it our all.. and I think better
> weather, better economy, more people..)

So the May release tends (in my experience) to have less in the way of
release parties and activity immediately around it. I think this is
because it's summer (at least in the northern half of the globe) and
school is either already or about to be. People are going on vacation,
etc. That said, I have zero data to back this up. I would think that
what is winter in NA and EMEA would prompt more reading and computer
time as well, but perhaps I am wrong and it's merely my inferences.
>
> 3) Not that almost 3 months is not enough time to write an article
> about F12 but I think that if we wrote articles about the upcoming
> Features in Fedora 13 now.. then expanded on those as we got closer we
> might also be able to have a consistent theme that runs within all of
> the articles other than the only theme being Fedora Itself...like
> working in the being 'green' low power consumption --

So here is the problem. Right now we don't know which features will be
in F13. To give you an example - Openchange was announced as a
potential feature for F10. I was thrilled with yet another barrier
being gone and started advertising the fact ahead of time, I even had
a magazine article queued up for LPM on the subject. However
Openchange didn't make the cut, and didn't debut til F11. I fear that
one we'd end up in a mad scramble to replace content at the 'last
minute' So until about 3 months before release we won't really know
what the whole 'approved' feature list is going to be.


I think the questions are still essentially what Mel posed:

1. Can we hit the financial requirements
2. Can we hit the editorial requirements
3. Can we make sure this remains a Fedora project funded by RHT and
not a RHT project supported with content from Fedora.

The people I have informally talked with on IRC seem to think it's a
good idea in general. Whether it is a good idea for F12 remains to be
seen.