Fedora.NEXT Products and the fate of Spins

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 29 January 2014 15:01, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 3:33 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org>
> 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.
>
> So I am being pulled in both directions on this. One of the goals of
> agility is to facilitate more things being made from Fedora (at least
> that was a discussed goal at various times). I agree with that and
> pushing aside the best things we have built from Fedora now
> (understanding they have been problematic in various ways in the past)
> seems to work against that goal.
>
> I don't accept the blanket assertion that the spins have little
> benefit. Do we actually have any idea how many people install Fedora
> from spins?
>
>
We have little knowledge about any installations. We can see that a lot of
spins are downloaded, but there is no way after that to say whether Spin A,
Spin B, or Regular DVD was the method a system was installed. Getting that
information in the past has been one of those 'bridge too far' in privacy.


> Irresponsible is bit loaded. I don't know that rel-eng will be
> overburdened by running the script that builds them. I also don't know
> that there aren't other creative arrangements that could be made to
> facilitate the creation and distribution of spins largely or entirely
> under the control of those creating them without pushing them entirely
> outside of Fedora infrastructure.
>
>
It is more than just running a script. There is the 'why the heck didn't
this spin build this time when it did the last 20 times?' that shows up for
about every spin at least once every release cycle. Most of that is usually
a couple hours of work here and there, but it isn't 0 maintenance (and
people like Dan Marshal have recently pitched in to help here )

Then there is that the QA of some of the spins is simple 'Does it
boot?'/'Does it install' and other parts aren't like when a spin had
various apps underneath the desktop didn't work but wasn't found until
after we had shipped for a while.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
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