Fedora.next in 2014 -- Big Picture and Themes

[Marcela Mašláňová]

On 01/29/2014 02:57 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> 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*
>
>
>
Now I'm confused too. Env and Stack WG should do new and cool things, 
but most of us are doing the boring work (databases and languages 
maintenance). I believe we can do the boring stuff even in  Fedora.next. 
Cool stuff will be somewhere above the boring.

Marcela