Where are we going? (Not a rant)

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 12/08/2012 05:31 PM, Michael Scherer wrote:
> Le samedi 08 décembre 2012 à 05:12 -0800, Dan Mashal a écrit :

> In fact, I never heard anyone complaining about "kde is dying" while the
> numbers are much more worrisome :
>   http://www.ohloh.net/p/kde/contributors/summary


> Maybe that's caused by some cleaning of their svn, or maybe that's just
> nokia's problem ( and the huge layoff that followed ).
>
> I would also add that if the switch to gnome 3 made enough people leave
> the project,
Which project are you referring to?

Fedora? It's thanks to Linux offering alternatives to Gnome, which 
allows users to switch to a different GUI.

> they would have gone to mate, and afaik, no one coding on
> mate has a @gnome.org email.
Well, this doesn't surprise me at all for several reasons, primarily
because many Gnome coders are employed for coding on Gnome, the Gnome 
coders are convinced about their work and because it's the Gnome 3 
dissatisfied users who are switching their GUI (user != coder).

> People told "users would migrate to xfce", yet it didn't translate into
> more contributors for the project :
> http://www.ohloh.net/p/xfce/contributors/summary
c.f. above. (user != coder).


>> "Let's make it look like Ubuntu because Ubuntu is popular" is another philosophy that
>> I have seen and I have a problem with.
>>
>> In addition, LTS won't solve this problem. It goes against everything Fedora stands for.
>
> So "first on feature" is a problem, but that's what Fedora stand for.
> Yet, LTS would be bad because it goes against what Fedora stand for.

IMO, no. LTS can also mean to improve parallel installations (ship 
forward-compat packages).

An alterative to LTS could be to improve upgrades (Make them 
easier/seamless) and encourage backward-compat packages.
For instance, I never understood why "last RHEL"-compatibility had never 
been an objective for Fedora.
Though this certainly will not always be possible, achieving this is 
likely possible for a larger number of packages.

Ralf