Underlying DE for the Workstation product, Desktop -vs- Workstation

[Christian Schaller]

I don't think anyone is dictating anything to anyone, but in general I think it is important to realize that when someone puts engineering resources on something,
in this case Red Hat, it will invariable affect the upstream in some way. So for instance the people working on upstream X.org at Red Hat are the same that are working on X in Fedora and the same who are working on X in RHEL. The natural consequence of this is that the person working on X.org in these three context is not going to shot him or herself in the foot by doing something in a which will negatively affect something in b or c if it can be possibly avoided. The same is true of Red Hat engineers working on GNOME or KDE, or any other project where Red Hat has fulltime engineers involved. That said this doesn't of course mean that said engineers never do anything in a context that has zero value in some of the others, but they are extremely unlikely to work for a upstream solution which is going to make their life more difficult downstream. I think the current init system debate in Debian is probably a good example of this.

So in the case of the Fedora Workstation, the engineers allocated to this at Red Hat are also the same engineers allocated to upstream X, GNOME, KDE etc. and the same people assigned to RHEL. So it is quite inevitable that the requirements of the Fedora Workstation will colour their upstream work and thus colour upstream. And I don't think this is a bad thing, having a more direct link between the 'upstream' development and a consumable product. I think we all see how horribly wrong things can go if for example a library has been developed in isolation from the the graphical user experience, where you end up having to do a really clunky UI simply because the library API doesn't allow you to do a nice one.

Christian


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Alex GS" <alxgrtnstrngl at gmail.com>
> To: desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Sent: Sunday, February 2, 2014 7:22:47 PM
> Subject: Re: Underlying DE for the Workstation product,	Desktop -vs- Workstation
> 
> liam.bulkley wrote:
> ---
> With regards to Fedora we are quite constrained so we have to carefully
> pick what we wish to pursue thus it makes most sense, to me, to make what
> changes we can to G3 and upstream them if possible.
> I think Gnome would benefit from an honest evaluation coming from those who
> they feel they can trust but who aren't involved with Gnome on a normal
> basis.
> ---
> 
> This is what I disagree with. The Fedora Workstation WG should never dictate
> design to the Gnome project. Gnome 3 is first an independent project and
> secondly perfectly suited for it's use-case a "mobile oriented and
> integrated Desktop used by tech savvy consumers and forward thinking
> business users". For this purpose I think Gnome 3 is excellent choice for
> many types of users. Fedora Workstation should stay out of Gnome's way and
> allow them to go on the journey they need to go on.
> 
> That's why Mate is a wise choice as the Workstation default as it allows for
> things to operate in parallel instead of getting Gnome's way and telling
> them how to do their job.
> 
> 
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