FESCo Workstation PRD follow up questions

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 4:59 AM, Christian Schaller <cschalle at redhat.com> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Josh Boyer" <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org>
>> To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" <desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org>
>> Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2014 6:46:01 PM
>> Subject: FESCo Workstation PRD follow up questions
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> As noted last week, FESCo deferred approval of the Workstation PRD
>> because they had some questions.  Below are the questions they've come
>> up with thus far.
>>
>> 1) How does the Fedora Design Team play into the standardization work?
>
>> This is in reference to the "Work towards standardizing and unifying
>> the Linux desktop space" bullet.  Specifically, the theme part IIRC.
>
> The Fedora design team is an integral part of the Fedora and part of the Emerging Platform Team
> inside Red Hat and plays a key part in ongoing development. Currently they are for
> instance in charge of coming up with a branding strategy for the 3 products.
> There is no plan to develop a Fedora specific theme currently, but the Fedora design
> theme will be pulled in to help for instance develop new icons in order to for instance
> be able to provide an integrated accessibility experience with high-contrast icon theme across
> the major toolkits supported by the workstation.
>
>> 2) What is the actual deliverable and delivery mechanism for Workstation?
>>
>> This is asking how we intend to ship the Workstation product.  ISO,
>> live USB image, something else?
>
> There is no plan to change this from what has been the primary delivery methods of
> Fedora so far. That said I think the emphasis will need to change where a USB sticks
> is the primary medium and DVDs the secondary.
>
>> 3) FESCo has said schedules should be kept in-sync for now. Should the
>> release schedule section still be included?
>>
>> This is in reference to the "The working group will also be
>> responsible for defining release schedule while also taking the needs
>> of the other working groups into consideration and the resources
>> available from the Fedora infrastructure team." line.
>>
>> We might consider just changing this to:
>>
>> "The working group will also be responsible for on-going feedback and
>> suggestions on release schedules, based on collaboration with upstream
>> components, the other Working Groups and FESCo, and Fedora
>> Infrastructure."
>
> Sounds fine.
>
>> 4) What traditional policies and rules will be modified from the
>> existing Fedora policies/rules?
>>
>> This is in reference to the section at the top of the PRD that says:
>> "Being a new product the Fedora Workstation will have its basic rules
>> and targets set through this PRD and thus there will be deviations
>> from some of the traditional policies or rules that the old Fedora
>> project followed. "
>>
>> FESCo has clearly and repeatedly stated that it retains oversight to
>> all decisions all WGs make.  It might be simpler to just remove this
>> line.
>>
>> Lastly, we now know that the 3rd party repository item has been, at
>> best, severely limited in what is considered permissible.  There were
>> comments on the ticket pertaining to this, but it was under discussion
>> by the Board so FESCo did not have a specific question for the PRD in
>> this regard.  I would anticipate FESCo will push back on the existing
>> text under the 3rd party section.  Perhaps we should reword this
>> before taking it back to FESCo?
>
> Sure.

I've made a few edits to the PRD to address these specific questions.
The individual diffs can be seen in the wiki history.  I modified the
3rd party repo section to simply read:

"Fedora Workstation will work to ensure that 3rd party software has a
stable underlying OS with a known set of APIs/services that ISVs and
other developers can rely on for their software. Fedora will not
include any non-free software by default or host any non-free software
in our repositories. "

I'll make sure FESCo is aware of the edits.  If anyone has objections
to the changes I've made, please speak up soon.

josh