What next?

[Daniel Veillard]

On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 02:12:09PM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> Who: fedora community people along with some red hat release engineers
> What: Fedora extras steering committee
> Why: We have to re-engineer EVERYTHING that y'all already have in order
> to: 1. support systems which are not inside red hat's network
>     2. have a buildsystem at all
>     3. have an errata release mechanism at all
>     4. have a db to coordinate any of these things.
>  We're not allowed to use or even see anything already written at rh b/c
> either: 1. it sucks or 2. it's part of the 'secret sauce' that some vp
> at rh thinks is valuable, somehow.
> 
> So we have to start over from scratch on everything and only a handful
> of those systems are in place:
>   1. cvs - only took a year to get it happening and another 6 months to
> use it
>   2. account system - only 18 months
>   3. build system - once extras got moving it took a mere 4 months to
> get time to take care of it - and we still have to throw one away.
>   4. errata system - not there yet - probably AT LEAST another 6 months
>   5. db for coordination - just starting
> 
> oh and we need all of those things YESTERDAY.
> 
> So there you go. - that's the list -

  thanks, I note that
    http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/
seems to imply all this background infrastructure will magically happen
and then people will be able to contribute. Maybe making public what need
to be done and building a community around making those and maintaining them
could help the magic disapear.

> now do you understand why we would
> like a little more time before the next release?

  No.  There is a lot of work needed to change the machine used to make
the final product called Fedora Core.  I don't see why developping
that new machine can't be done in parallel with the current one still
running. I'm only left with the guess that you think doing both in
parallel need more workforce than we have currently, is that right ?
If it's the case it might be worth asking why there isn't more volunteers
to help on the infrastructure.

  Again don't consider I'm coming from a Red Hat angle, I'm more trying
to find parallels with other projects I know like GNOME where we had
some similar problems (building a release team, sysadmin maintainance,
etc.) but which were less core to the project itself.

  Also I'm perfectly fine being told that I'm just bothering the people
doing the work, in which case I will just return to my dark cave.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard at redhat.com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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