Fedora.NEXT Products and the fate of Spins

[Jon]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
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> Apologies for the slightly alarmist $SUBJECT, but I want to make sure
> that this gets read by the appropriate groups.

[snip]


>
> 1) Are Spins useful as they currently exist? There are many problems
> that have been noted in the Spins process, most notably that it is
> very difficult to get a Spin approved and then has no ongoing
> maintenance requiring it to remain functional. We've had Spins at
> times go through entire Fedora release cycles without ever being
> functional.
>

Putting on my rel-eng hat I can say that any spin that fails to
compose will be dropped.

I believe we also encourage or even require the spin maintainers to
test their spin as functional.
(To work out if the spin succeeds to compose but fails to actually work)

The idea is to encourage active spin process, inactive spins will auto
retire by policy if they fail.

Another aspect I worry about is the mirroring stuff.
With the coming WGs I fear the rsync mirroring will grow very large,
and spins are an attractive piece of fat to cut.
Reducing size is something we worry about on the infra, rel-eng side of things.

> 2) Should Spins be eliminated entirely in favor of Fedora Remixes[1].
> The effect here would be that Spins are no longer an official part of
> The Fedora Project but are instead projects unto themselves which are
> permitted to consume (possibly large) portions of our tools, packages
> and ecosystem. Maintenance and upkeep of these spins then becomes
> entirely the responsibility of the downstream community that
> constructs them and has no mandatory draw on Fedora's marketing,
> ambassadors or quality assurance resources.

Again, from the rel-eng perspective... this proposal sounds nice.
(removing spins in favor of remix)
It would reduce the complexity of my work flow.
So selfishly speaking removing spins sounds great.

However, they are an important part of our community, and I'd feel sad
to see them disappear.
There is a nice aspect of them being partially hooked into the rel-eng
process that adds value.
The community comes together, spin maintainers have a list they talk
to each other.
We push them to provide quality product, etc.

In my view a remix is something that contains stuff that Fedora cannot.
Say for example, my chromebook remixes in F19... those broke with
Fedora principles by using evil vendor tree kernels.
So in my thinking that is what a remix is for..... but spins 100% stay
with the Fedora way of things, our four foundations or whatever.

In my opinion the WGs are big giant uber-spins.



[snip]
...


-Jon Disnard
FAS: parasense
IRC: masta