RFC: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next" (draft of my Flock talk)

[Marcela Mašláňová]

On 07/23/2013 06:07 PM, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
> Matthew Miller píše v Po 22. 07. 2013 v 09:38 -0400:
>>    Conclusion
>>    ---
>>
>>    * Refocus Core to provide a better platform for building on
>>    * Make room for innovation at the "Ring 2" level
>>    * Empower SIGs to create solutions that fit
>>    * Won't break what we have
>>    * And we can start right now
>>
>> So there we have it. Comments and discussion,  please!
>
> The proposal looks frankly very cloud-centric. I have no problem with
> that. What else should a Fedora cloud architect propose? But I'd like to
> know a few things:
> Is the proposal based at least a bit on some kinda of analysis of our
> more successful competitors in the cloud area? Yeah, I'm speaking about
> Ubuntu which currently holds 50 percent of the market. Ubuntu has been
> very successful in the cloud and in the proposal I really don't see a
> lot of things that Ubuntu has/does better and Fedora doesn't have/does
> worse.
> I just want to make sure that we won't turn the whole Fedora upside down
> to make us more successful in the cloud and then find out that something
> completely different was making us unsuccessful and competitors
> successful. IMHO closings gaps between the competitors and us and
> staying excellent in our strong areas would probably be probably a safer
> strategy than turning everything upside down.
>
> BTW speaking of Ubuntu, I think they've got quite different strategy -
> one tightly integrated product across all uses (server, cloud, desktop,
> and now maybe even tablets and phones). To solve the problem of newer
> versions, special interests etc., they've got the ecosystem of PPAs.
> That's where third-party entities can deliver software the way they
> want. And AFAIK it has been widely popular with upstream projects
> because they've got free hands with PPAs. And Ubuntu still has one
> defined product and doesn't have to lower standards for software
> inclusion.
> IMHO it's a better solution than breaking the distribution into several
> parts with different speed of development and different quality
> standards from which you can build all kinds of fragmented products. At
> least from the marketing point of view. As a user, I'd rather use a
> well-defined distribution with one set of quality standards (and if I
> wanted something special, I'd easily enable a third-party repo for that)
> than a distro with well-defined core, but not so well-defined layers of
> grey zone above it.
>
> Just my 2c,
> Jiri
>
I'm not cloud person at all and I like the Rings proposal. Server can be 
still based on Ring0 and Ring1, so I don't see how it harm other use-cases.
Same standards for all packages simply didn't work. It can be seen 
during every (mass, language) rebuild, which brings many problems for 
those running the rebuild. Different people tend to package things 
differently, even if there are guidelines. Lowering standards in some 
areas and creating packages automatically might give people time to work 
on their projects based above these packages. I guess the example with 
Hadoop and Jetty is a good one, which can be often seen.
I also believe we need something like PPA. If koji needs new features, 
or if new build system would be used, that's another part of the discussion.

Marcela