What makes a spin a Spin?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Telling people to "deal with this localization stuff" is pretty
>  useless.  I've voiced concerns with some of the technical issues, as
>  well as questioned what the overall intention of "spins" is and all
>  you can say is "deal with it"?

Obviously we've got our signals crossed. Apologizes.  I don't want to
get into a situation where releng is demanding a level of quality
assurance but is unwilling or unable to do all the work necessary to
meet that level of quality assurance.

>  We _are_ dealing with it.  Infrastructure was kind enough to provide
>  xen instances for spins to be created on.  I'm volunteering to do the
>  actual spin creation.  Rel-eng is working out a proposal (which I know
>  various Board members have seen drafts of) for how to handle this.
>
>  However, now we're coming back to the Board and asking them to help
>  with the scope of what officially hosted spins are.  If you want to
>  have a productive discussion on that, then by all means let's start.  If
>  not, then I'll just ignore you and wait for someone who does.


First things first, as per our irc conversation.
Blessing != hosted.
Let's get that out of the way.  So far in Board discussions, we've
thought about the doomdays scenario of 200 localized spins.  We need a
way to be able to grant trademark usage to spins to things that we are
not hosting centrally. We know hosting space is going to constraint
what we can offer up centrally.

But localized spins are going to continue to happen, there is going to
be an explosion of them whether or not they get to use our trademarks
or not.

>
>  Mini-rant aside, there is usually middle ground to be found and I
>  don't think this issue is an exception.  My brief proposal would be:
>
>  1) All kickstart files for a spin, localized or not, are vetted by
>  rel-eng for a few basic items.

ah there's the rub... how basic can you get..without it being too time
consuming?

>
>  2) "Featured Spins", those with larger content differences, are driven
>  through the remaining steps by rel-eng of creation, smoke testing/beta,
>  and final hosting.  Defining what qualifies for this spin "status" is
>  where we need Board help.  Or maybe we don't if the Board doesn't
>  care.  Rel-eng could likely make this determination on it's own if the
>  Board wishes.

I'm sure Board members care about quality, to varying degrees.  But as
an institution, the Board isn't always going to have enough technical
minded people to keep on top of quality.  In fact if anything, the
Board is going to become less and less technical over time.  if we
want a process that blocks trademark usage on technical quality, there
has to be a cog in the machine which consistently makes a
determination concerning technical quality. If we need to grow
manpower outside of releng to deal with this growing workload, we'll
make an effort to grow it.

>
>  3) Smaller spins, such as localized spins, are created and hosted
>  elsewhere.
>
>  I can imagine item #3 gives some people concern, as the final isos
>  would be created outside of the main fedora infrastructure.

I've been working under the assumption so far that this was a
non-starter for a proposal. But if rel-eng is cool with it, then I'm
cool with it.

>  However,
>  the Fedora Unity project has been doing this for a while now and I
>  believe they are a _very_ good example of how well it can work.

I'm not going to argue with that.

-jef