Workstation PRD approval

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 05:34:31AM -0500, Christian Schaller wrote:
>> > On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 01:47:48PM +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
>> > wrote:
>> > So who do we expect to provide those engineering resources? We seem to
>> > agree that those general users are, in many cases, the developers and
>> > enthusiasts that we expect to support, so we need to ensure that there's
>> > development effort put into ensuring that the desktop experience itself
>> > is compelling.
>>
>> I expect the vast majority of our engineering resources to come from Red Hat.
>
> Red Hat will be committing engineering resources to support the general
> user desktop?
>
>> > The list of use cases is supposed to define the sets of users that we'll
>> > consider during development. We agree that the needs of the general
>> > desktop user are important and have to be considered during development,
>> > which means that it's a supported use case. Which obviously means it
>> > should be enumerated in the set of use cases.
>>
>> I disagree, it is meant to enumerate the areas we give special focus during development. Adding a 'catch all' usecase
>> like 'general users' doesn't help anyone do anything.
>
> I don't think you understand what "use case" means. It's the set of ways
> that people can use our system that we wish to support. We wish to
> support users who aren't actively engaging in development and who aren't
> CS students, so they should be included in the set of use cases that we
> support.

We've reached a stalemate on this.

On the one hand we have a case that aims Workstation at becoming a
development environment for a broad set of possible software.  On the
other we have one that places importance on general desktop usage.
Neither of them are actually conflicting with each other in any way
other than whether the latter is implicit in the former.

It seems we have a trust issue here.  There's a lack of trust that a
development focused Workstation can possibly be generally usable while
also solving problems for the developer set.  There's a lack of trust
that resources will be put forward where necessary.  And there's a
complete lack of faith that other contributors and upstreams can fill
the role of developing applications and such for the general use case.

I can't solve this, but the (agonizingly delayed) back and forth going
on right now is not lending itself to actually accomplishing anything
at all.  If we don't set a direction soon, and have faith that people
won't have their heads up their collective arses and hold myopic views
of "targets", then we're going to continue to languish.

We have a deadline for the PRD coming up in about a week.  I'd like to
actually have something to present to FESCo.  Can we please either
agree to trust each other or barring that call for a vote on one of
the current draft PRDs?  Members of the Workstation WG really need to
speak up here.

josh