FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[Callum Lerwick]

On Fri, 2009-05-01 at 00:48 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 03:33:28PM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> 
> > Remember kids, we probably shouldn't be listening to you. Red Hat
> > Desktop == Smart. You == Dumb.
> 
> The problem with the desktop is that it's obvious, looks simple and 
> everyone has an opinion on it. But not all of these opinions are equally 
> valid. This kind of situation is much easier to deal with in, say, the 
> kernel VM system - in that case it would be perfectly acceptable for 
> people who spend their entire working lives concentrating on a specific 
> topic to say that they know better than people who occasionally touch 
> upon it.

... And the kernel VM people tend to be able to back up their expertise
with hard data. If a patch isn't an improvement in some provable manner,
it doesn't get in to the kernel.

And the kernel has a pretty hard line stance on regressions. If a patch
causes regressions, it's ripped out immediately. No matter who wrote it.

We trust data, not experts.

> It's not about smart versus dumb. If we trust these people then we have 
> to assume that in most cases they *will* know better than people who 
> argue against them on mailing lists. And if we don't trust them then 
> there's something pretty fundamentally wrong with the way we're 
> producing this distribution.

Trust, but verify.
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