Fedora.next in 2014 -- Big Picture and Themes

[Tom Hughes]

On 23/01/14 18:26, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
>
>> And I really wonder if Fedora.next is really backed by those community
>> contributors that are not involved in Fedora to deeply. One reason for
>
> I wonder the same.  However, I don't think it's because we haven't
> necessarily asked in all of the usual places, or haven't tried to
> reach as many people as possible.  There has been very little response
> from anyone and I can't tell if it's from indifference or from a lack
> of them even being aware.  It's really hard to tell.

Personally I think a lot of it has to do with the way the whole thing 
seemed to be a fait accompli such that there seemed to be little point 
doing anything other than sitting back and seeing what happened.

You know, the way one minute it was just a suggestion from one member of 
the community and the next minute it was all decided and people were 
busy forming working groups to sort out the details. Apparently that 
miraculous transition happened at Flock, but for anybody that wasn't 
there it was as if it was a god given edict that had been handed down on 
tablets of stone that Fedora.next was happening and we should all just 
be good little children and get on with it.

Even the formation of the working groups was odd - the original decision 
to form them, as I read it, was that they were to explore the idea of 
doing these three streams but within days it seemed that the question 
was no longer whether to do them but rather how to do them.

>> That's why I got the feeing a lot of contributors are simply waiting
>> for more concrete details to emerge before deciding what to make of
>> Fedora.next; or they simply at all don't care to much what the higher
>> ups do, as getting involved on that level can cost quite a lot of time
>> and can be frustrating (that's not a complaint, that's simply how it
>> is often; wasn't much different in my days, but noticed that more when
>> I wasn't that active an more myself).
>
> If they are waiting, what are they waiting for?  If they don't care,
> and they just want to maintain a package or 30 packages, is there
> anything that you see in Fedora.next that would prevent them from
> doing that?  There will always be varied level of participation, and I
> think we need to have a development model that encourages that and
> allows for growth.  I don't think Fedora.next gets in the way of that,
> but I would love to have other opinions.

To be honest my concerns are more with my user hat on than my 
contributor hat - that we will lose the gold standard unified packaging 
standards and single source and mechanism for installing packages.

The actual spins (or whatever you want to call them) aren't something 
that bother me at all, as they are to my mind largely irrelevant for 
anybody other than a new user. When I bring a new machine up I just want 
to get a base OS on and access to the package repository and what 
packages are installed by default doesn't really bother me.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/