Fedora.next in 2014 -- Big Picture and Themes

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 06:15:49PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Just to wax philosophical for a minute: I think there's a lot of value
> in building boring stuff that works well, and I might be weird, but I

[snip eloquent defense of the virtues of boring basic distro work]

> This doesn't mean I'm against doing Big Exciting New Things in general
> or Fedora.next in particular, but I do want to stand up for the value of
> just keeping your head down (hah, I know, Adam, practice what you
> preach) and doing good, dull engineering work. With your pocket
> protector firmly in place.

This is all very convincing. But you also sent me a convincing message the
other week about Fedora's place on the innovation curve and, basically, the
difficulty of doing all that good dull work while being innovative. Stop
convincing me in different directions -- my head will fall off!

Or, in seriousness, because I don't think they're *necessarily* in direct
conflict, what do you think we should do about all of the above? Our mission
and branding, including our foundations, tend to steer away from the dull
and towards new shiny. In fact, whenever we do something that could be
characterized as head-down plodding forward progress instead of a bold leap,
we hear *quite a bit* of sarcasm about the four foundations in the online
chatter.

So, should we look at reconciling that in some way? Part of *my* idea for
Fedora.next was that the base circle could focus more on this careful and
non-thrilling engineering work while the outer rings could do the
big-exciting things at the same time. (Or even have *some* parts of the
outer rings working on big-exciting, while other parts work on _even more
solid_.)

*goes and gets coffee. not able to quite express what I mean. hope you
understand anyway*



-- 
Matthew Miller    --   Fedora Project    --    <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>