Board efforts: scope, concept, and permission?

[Bill Nottingham]

Toshio Kuratomi (a.badger at gmail.com) said: 
> My other mail suggests that one way to work with this is to create new
> conflicting packages that are optimized for the different usages.  There's
> other ways as well but the general theme is that we need to be looking at
> ways to open up what people can do with the raw material of the Fedora
> Project to create their vision of a free software operating system rather
> than closing off what Fedora can be good for and making it so that certain
> visions are second class citizens that can only advance as long as they
> don't conflict with a different, specific vision.

Would that mean that users who don't start with one of these 'products'
get to magically try and choose which implementation of which they want?
Perhaps even mix and match, leaving QA and the developers to sort out
the results.

Furthermore, you then leave 'downstream' higher-level packages and
applications having to, for example, code to PolicyKit0, PolicyKit1, or
consolehelper, depending on what each 'product' use case might use. Or,
having to build their python extensions simultaneously for python2.4, python2.6,
and python3.0. These sorts of things would be extremely painful for
developers, and would bloat the QA matrix excessively.

Not to reduce the debate to too much of a soundbite, but it almost
seems like attempting to decide whether we want Fedora to be Debian,
or to be something useful for users of it. I'd always pick the latter...

Bill