DE discussion summary

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 8:54 AM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org> 
wrote:
> 
> So, we really kind of need to settle on something and get started.
> 
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME 
and Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange - 
it's a bit like having a friend who suddenly meets someone else they 
find interesting, and maybe you get a polite wave when you're passing.

You'd be left wondering what you did wrong...

Now of course there has been a lot of feedback - sometimes intense 
amounts, but there is simply not enough engineering time to even hope 
to address more than a small percentage of it.

There needs to be a functional feedback mechanism that separates the 
high-priority targets clearly.

Further, I really dislike the mindset where it's all about switching 
between pre-formed but completely different things.  There is a whole 
spectrum of options in between, such as small forking. 

I think this is something where technology drives culture - packages 
*punish* forking - you have to tediously rename all of the upstream 
source code so that the files don't stomp on each other, just for the 
completely obscure use case of having multiple desktops "installed" at 
the same time.

Which then in turn makes it *much, much harder* to merge back.  
Instead, packages reward writing completely new implementations.   Of 
course, I come at this from the OSTree perspective, which makes it 
pretty easy to have scalable branches that you can switch between, 
instead of requiring co-installation.

And finally, the relative omission of the fact that Red Hat Enterprise 
Linux 7 has *already forked* in this discussion is kind of odd, to say 
the least.  Personally I think classic mode is a visible symbol of the 
malfunctioning feedback mechanism.  Or really, not even feedback - it 
should be about cooperation, with actual *code* flowing both ways.


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