GNOME as the default desktop (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Minutes - 2010-12-06)

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2010-12-16 at 14:42 +0000, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-12-16 at 12:24 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> 
> > ... because they work for Red Hat. Note that I'm not saying they are
> > evil people, it's just in the nature of things they operate behind
> > closed doors. It is so much easier to quickly go from one cube to the
> > next to make a decision than having to bother with a committee, a
> > mailing list or the many voices of the community.
> 
> It is quite noticeable that the desktop mailing list is very
> low-traffic, and almost all the threads that do happen on it start when
> someone outside of the desktop team asks something.
> 
> We're currently in the middle of the initial development on one of the
> biggest changes in the default desktop in years - the switch to GNOME 3
> - but on the desktop list, there have been four threads in the last
> month, all started by people outside the team and not directly related
> to the actual development effort. Two of them were started by me. One of
> mine was about arranging desktop Test Days (which mclasen has been very
> helpful with); the other three were all casual Rawhide users asking
> about bugs / surprises in the experience. There's no actual 'work'
> traffic on there. It is a quite opaque process, it seems.

Other notable omissions: as Christoph notes, the desktop group appears
to have no public meetings. They seem to have no public activity
tracking system - there's nowhere that significant projects are tracked
and documented. Other teams use trac extensively for this.

I think there's an interesting difference here in that Fedora's
'desktop' team is almost entirely composed of people who are significant
upstream GNOME developers. The other desktop teams are not. Fedora's KDE
packagers are not core KDE developers (some are contributors, but not
all, and not to the extent of the 'desktop' team), Xfce packagers are
not core Xfce developers, LXDE packagers are not core LXDE developers.

So the other teams come with a built-in...for want of a better word,
'allegiance' to Fedora and to the concept of packaging a product
provided from elsewhere into Fedora. For the desktop team it's much more
slippery; I suspect that for a lot of them there isn't much of a
dividing line between working on GNOME and working on Fedora, the two
just kinda roll together. I think this is probably why stuff like the
libnotify bump happens; it's part of working on GNOME, so hey, it goes
into Fedora.

I think this comes with benefits to Fedora as well as drawbacks, but
it's the source of some of the apparent discrepancies between how the
'desktop' team works and how all the other desktop team works: they're
really pretty different entities.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net