FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Matthew Garrett]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 09:21:34AM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > But when we talk about Fedora features, we're not talking about
> > packaging updates.
> 
> But all this focus on "Fedora features" is what I'm objecting to in the
> first place. Users care about what features are there, not about who wrote
> them. Yet I don't see us filling in feature pages for every new feature in
> upstream KDE (and it probably wouldn't be welcome according to the feature
> process, it focuses on stuff developed by Fedora contributors).

And we don't write feature pages for every upstream feature in the rest 
of Fedora. What we /do/ do is write feature pages for features that are 
being developed, tested and integrated in the context of Fedora. Often, 
these features will ship in Fedora before they land upstream.

> > When we talk about what differentiates Fedora from other distributions,
> > it's rarely the quality of the packaging that's the focus.
> 
> I think it's quite the opposite. We all package the same software. The
> packaging is what differentiates us from the others.

When I read reviews of distributions I note that they generally 
concentrate on the feature set, not on the packaging. If we were all 
shipping identical software, there'd be even less to chose between the 
distributions than there currently is.

> > If the primary focus of Fedora is to produce a compelling operating
> > system, then upstream features and development are a significant part of
> > making that argument to potential users.
> 
> But what if upstream is doing well already and does not need our help?

But it's not. From a marketing perspective, there's a huge benefit in 
being able to say "This is Fedora. It has these features". If KDE is to 
be considered equivalent to Gnome we need to be able to claim the same 
feature set. KDE upstream is (unsurprisingly) not too worried about 
working on things just because they're priorities for Fedora, so that 
has to be done by us.

> > I'm sure, yes. It makes several mistakes that I've been arguing against
> > for years (presenting power management in terms of profiles, making it
> > easy for users to change cpu frequency governer mode without making it
> > clear that almost anything they change there will consume more power and
> > will probably compromise performance, implying that "performance" and
> > "pwoersaving" are a tradeoff)
> 
> KDE focuses on configurability. You won't get a KDE developer to agree to
> not give the user any options.

The reason to give people choice is because you don't know what the 
right answer is. In power management there's often a very small set of 
right answers, with everything else being actively wrong and harmful. 
Giving the user the choice to choose those incorrect answers isn't a 
feature.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org