Fedora.NEXT Products and the fate of Spins

[Dan Mashal]

On Wed, 2014-01-29 at 16:33 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 4:03 PM, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 2:57 PM, H. Guémar <hguemar at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I think we should keep spins as long as we don't have a formal process to
> >> accept new products.
> >> Something like => proposal => crop (aka product-to-be) => validation =>
> >> product
> >> When we'll have that, drop the whole spin thing, any spin that isn't fit to
> >> be a product should be reclassified as remix.
> >
> > Why do we expect spins to be any more official products than they are now?
> >
> > I can't really imagine this ever working. Do you imagine a day where
> > Fedora has 20, 30, 50 official products? I don't.
> >
> > I'd rather not confuse what is made from Fedora bits with what is
> > based on Fedora bits but includes other bits. The remix branding does
> > not seem appropriate for spins that are made purely from Fedora bits.
> 
> That's fair.  From a resource and quality perspective though, I'd
> rather not burden rel-eng and QA with having to maintain, create, and
> test spins.  They can be done entirely outside of Fedora.  They can be
> created and hosted on their own sites, etc.
> 
> F20 improved spins overall, but that was because of a concerted effort
> with our existing resources.  If Fedora.next is going to succeed,
> those resources are already going to be overwhelmed with the 3
> products.  Spreading them thinner for little benefit in most cases
> seems irresponsible.

Hi,

Spin maintainer here. 

1) Are spins useful question: 

I have gotten many emails from users that enjoy spins. I was also
thinking about introducing 2 new spins for F21 (Cinnamon and
Enlightenment). 

Spins offer a things that the netinstall and DVD don't:

1) Boot Fedora without installing it
2) Install fedora without having to download the entire DVD or connect
to the internet.

2) In regards to the resources consumed by spins:

I disagree that Spins use a lot of releng/QA resources.

Releng has scripts to compose spins. They have been doing this every
release for a long time.

QAing a spin is simple. Grab the ISO, boot it. Does it work? Does
installation complete. QA done.

Design team is also involved in the spins process. They create artwork
and the webpage for the spin itself.

Again, I don't think that the resource consumption is significant at all

3) Should spins be made into remixes.

Absolutely not in my opinion. This would probably just kill them off.

Dan