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

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 02:54:26PM +0000, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 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.

I'd expect to see upstream development happening transparently on an
upstream list.  Perhaps this is what we're looking for?

http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list

> 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.

It's a more difficult situation, to be sure.  I'd expect it's pretty
hard to conduct the same discussions in multiple places.  Heck, I've
seen plenty of complaints when it happens just within Fedora itself
(devel list + Bugzilla, or plenty of other combinations).

The SIG page does, as always, show where to find the Desktop team at
work: "Traditionally, the desktop team has been using the
#fedora-desktop IRC channel on GimpNet, but many of us can also be
found in the #fedora-devel channel on freenode."

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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