Board efforts: scope, concept, and permission?

[Mike McGrath]

On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 06:33:52PM -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:
> >
> > spins don't help this situation.
> >
> They do.  I tried to switch from the Desktop spin to the KDE spin in F10 and
> ended up without a usable desktop environment.  Reinstalled from the KDE
> spin and it worked.  So "how do you get KDE on your computer?"  "Install
> the Fedora KDE spin."  Easy answer.
>

Spins didn't help, reinstalling did.  You could have done the same thing
without a spin and the live or dvd media.

> >
> > A pickup truck with a minivan engine sucks bad.  Real bad.  That's why
> > they don't make them.
> >
> Are you drawing the conclusion here that it's time for us to split the
> package collection so each SIG can work from their own packageset or are you
> just nit picking an irrelevant point in mine?
>

That's it exactly.  I'm not picking nits.  If we're going to have
different target audiences we need to be able to build specifically for
them.  That includes letting the spins decide on their own if their
audience needs a quick release cycle.  Or if they really need the newer
kernel, or a support cycle of 4 years, etc.

The alternative is picking one audience and targeting just for them.

So why do I argue for the latter?  Because to do the former correctly
would be a massive massive undertaking.  Right now we're doing the former
in a half assed manner.  So people show up thinking Fedora is for them,
it's for the server, it's for the desktop, it's for OLPC's, it's for
kiosks, etc.  Then when they find out it's really not that, they have a
bad experience with Fedora and go elsewhere.

I really don't know what our users are a measure of.  I don't think it's
marketing as inode0 suggests, because the people using Fedora already know
about it.  But if we step back and take our users seriously.  We'll find
that since Fedora Core 6 released in 2006-10-24 to today, we've
experienced a net growth of negative 3%.  Yup, a 3% loss of users.

Our own users are moving _AWAY_ from Fedora.  For whatever reason more
users have chosen to not use Fedora then who have chosen to use Fedora.
I suspect many have moved downsteam to Enterprise Linux.  Which is ok
but it's an indication that people came, tried Fedora, and moved on.

	-Mike