DE discussion summary

[Josh Boyer]

Well, that was a spirited and wide-ranging discussion I kicked off.
Not exactly surprising, but somewhat tangential at times.  I thought
I'd try and summarize a few things here and bring some focus back.
Here are some themes that were brought up in the previous thread.

1) Workstation should use $DE

This is fine, and it's the basis of my original thread.  We need to
evaluate which DE we want, why we think it's best positioned, and move
forward.

2) Workstation means the end of alternative DEs

This is very much untrue.  Other DE Spins exist today, and I believe
that the WG members would like to see them continue to exist.  That's
not to say the WG could even make them go away, but instead it's to
illustrate that Workstation isn't meant to discourage or prevent other
interesting work from happening.  The members of the WG clearly see
value in such work, and it should continue.

The Workstation product cannot dictate what people work on, and
frankly if we dropped all other DEs from Fedora entirely I would
probably move on.  We need alternatives both to satisfy the people
that clearly love them and to provide counter-points to whatever DE
the WG picks.

3) Workstation (and Fedora.next) is just more of the same Fedora

I'd be willing to allow that at first glance it could look like that.
However, the picking of a DE is the _starting_ point for the product.
The actual difference in terms of presentation, technical stability,
etc only comes after we have one thing to focus on.  The DE, frankly,
is the least interesting part of the ideas around what the Product
should be.

So yes, there will likely be some overlap between today's Fedora and
Fedora.next, but that is because Fedora.next is supposed to be
improvement on top of the massive body of work Fedora has already
done.  Starting from scratch with a radical new approach to everything
seems counter-productive to me.

4) Workstation should use all DEs interchangeably

This might be an eventual possibility, but it's not something we can
feasible accomplish from the start.  Personally, I don't think it's a
good idea overall because worrying about all DEs (or the most popular
ones) at the same time means you explode your design, development, and
testing requirements.  That isn't going to help get a product out the
door.  Combine that with the fact that other DE Spins can and should
exist, and it allows the WG to focus on the product while letting
those other Spins progress on their own.

5) This is upstream GNOME just taking over

I don't believe anyone actually said that verbatim, but it seems
implied in several replies.  Firstly, I suggested GNOME as the
underlying DE for the same reasons Fedora has primarily chosen it as
the default offering.  That's it.  Secondly, we have WG members that
have already said they believe Workstation needs to set it's own goals
and agenda, and will deviate where necessary from upstream.  I believe
that applies to any DE chosen, including GNOME.

-----

So, we really kind of need to settle on something and get started.
This is just the first technical item to decide, and then we need to
asses it's impacts on the repositories (anything missing/need
changing), how we're going to test it, the impacts on other teams,
etc.  Ultimately it's up to the WG members to vote on, and I think we
should likely hold a vote next week.  Let's aim for a call for voting
next Monday.

josh