DE discussion summary

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 11:28:16AM +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> 
> On 02/10/2014 11:09 AM, Richard Hughes wrote:
> >On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org> wrote:
> >>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
> >The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we
> >want to use for workstation" is just crazy.
> 
> Why is that so crazy?
> 
> Mean why is not the workstation role a role that desktop environment
> can transition too chooses they do to so?
> 
> Hmm perhaps i should try to form that question differently which
> pehaps sheds a better light as I see it.
> 
> Now that the "Default desktop" role will be vacated with Gnome that
> has served that role being moved to "Workstation role" leaving any
> other of the DE to apply for the now vacant Default Desktop role how
> is that different from allowing them to transition to workstation
> role?

The idea of Fedora.next and the separate products is not to keep the
same default product, plus add others, but rather transition to a new
model.  Sorry if that was unclear.

> >  I think we're kidding
> >ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the
> >biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has
> >several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts
> >of the stack that GNOME uses.
> 
> Irrelevant since those contribution happen upstream by our sponsor
> and for as long as I can remember more or less everyone part of the
> Gnome desktop team have *always* wanted us to move reports etc
> upstream so when an claim is made that we benefit *directly* from
> our sponsor can you clarify how that directly is being done in our
> downstream distribution in other words what are those Fedora
> specific bits by those order of magnitudes are *directly* bringing
> to the project.

The integration efforts are performed directly in Fedora.  We benefit
directly from those efforts.  The fact that the software works well as
a result in other distros or combinations is an added benefit and a
result of FOSS methodology.

> >  If I remember correctly, we have about
> >two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on
> >MATE.
> 
> Again irrelevant those community's are larger then a single or
> several Red Hat employees

Not irrelevant since a product is a result of good integration effort,
not just vanilla combinations of upstream.  One of the main benefits
of a more focused approach is getting beyond that result.

> >Fedora may be a community distro, but without the backing of Red
> >Hat, it wouldn't be viable at all.
> 
> Arguable because we have not ( indirectly through trademark ) be
> allowed to seek outside sponsorship.

We do have outside sponsorship.  http://fedoraproject.org/ will show
you sponsorships by non-Red Hat entities.

> >  When there's a Fedora release
> >blocker that needs a few days of developer time, who do you think
> >picks up the tab? I think that's probably an important thing to
> >understand before damaging the relationship any further on votes that
> >can only result in huge flame wars and a lot of wasted time.
> 
> Each "product" will have to have their own release criteria and be
> blocked accordingly as well as releasing on different schedule for
> this whole multi product proposal to work afaikt so I dont see how
> that's relevant.

No such details have been determined yet by the WGs.  Even if it was
the case that different schedules were needed, I can't imagine this
project is unable to figure out how to mitigate those issues through
coordinating the various cadences, or some other solution.  Rather, it
seems to me the point of handling blockers is directly relevant to
releases.  We wouldn't want to release despite them.

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