Request: please consider clarifying the project's position on Spins

[Bill Nottingham]

"Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" (johannbg at gmail.com) said: 
> On 12/01/2010 10:32 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> >  From the report of the Spins committee last release.. the Spins group
> > was in bad shape themselves. Between all the problems with ownership,
> > testing issues, lack of manpower, and just the approach of live images
> > had the last spin person saying he wasn't doing it any more.
> 
> That actually comes as a no surprise here..
> 
> Any other *DE has to work twice as hard then the Gnome Desktop that 
> seems to get project resources as it pleases and if it is gaining 
> momentum it's like forces within the project throw obstacles in it's 
> path to hinder that momentum.


... 'get project resources'? That was *never* the point of spins,
in everything that I remember. (outside of delivery resources)

Way back in the day, there was only the main tree. And we shipped it.

Then, there was the Desktop Live image, and it was asked:

"Hey rel-eng, can you build this? And proto-QA, can you test this?"

"Um, sure, OK."

Then the KDE SIG asked, "hey, we'd like a live image too. Hey, rel-eng,
can you build this? And proto-QA, can you test this?"

"Sure, I guess so".

And then came someone wanting XFCE. And someone wanting LXDE. And someone
saying "hey, I'd like to build an Electronics Lab". And then someone
mentioned Sugar. And they all said, "Hey, rel-eng, can you build this?
And proto-QA, can you test this?"

Then proto-QA and rel-eng both said "hey, wait a minute... no, not really."

And that's where the spins SIG was born - the idea was that if someone
wanted to build something interesting in Fedora that wasn't already being
produced, here was a place for them to collaborate, to show up and do their
work, and then their work could be distributed and promoted. The idea was
that each group/individual would join the spins SIG, bring their testing,
and so on.

Much like Fedora doesn't realistically support someone showing up and saying
"hey, I've got this upstream source - please give me some packagers to do this",
the spins sig was never about "hey, I've got these Fedora packages - please
give me some rel-eng, QA, docs, etc. to productize it". It's supposed to
be participatory.

So, while I agree - we need better communication, better documentation, and
the 'join' part of rel-eng is laughably non-existent - I'm not really
concerned at all if there happen to occasionally be spins that are dropped
because they didn't get tested, or they were broken. Stuff happens.

> I say give all *DE all spins equal support from the community, give them 
> complete decision freedom on how they do things and how they ship them ( 
> for example iso vs usb key image ) and let them decide their target 
> audience and the primary vision that the project has is to be that 
> platform of the choice with the best tools of the trades.

So, if for one release we suddenly have an Enlightenment request,
a Fluxbox request, a icewm request, and a GNUStep request, whatever
resources happen to be currently going to other spins get cut by that
much, even if these new spin contributions didn't bring anything to
the table? That seems like a really awful, non-scalable way to run a
project, and it's a drastic shift from what we did before.

(Now, if we want each spin to fork off their own subproject, with their
own rel-eng, their own QA, and maybe even their own SCM branches?
That's more likely to scale.)
 
And frankly, one of ideas behind spins was that it was a way to showcase
the exciting, innovative work that can be done in Fedora. If the only
exciting, innovative stuff we can come with as a community is just
10 different implementations of a panel, terminal, window manager, and file
manager... that's pretty sad. 

Bill