Fedora.NEXT Products and the fate of Spins

[Jon]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 5:48 PM, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 5:19 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 29 January 2014 15:49, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 4:39 PM, Jon <jdisnard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > 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.
>>>
>>> You probably didn't mean for that to sound so negative but a piece of
>>> fat to cut is how rel-eng thinks of spins?
>>>
>>> I recall being assured at the beginning that some interested company
>>> was willing to provide the necessary support for us to give this a
>>> fair try.
>>>
>>
>> How long is a fair try? It would help to define that before people go on a
>> rant about doing it for a couple of years now.
>
> I meant giving our new adventure a fair try, not giving spins a fair
> try. I also really did not mean to go on a rant.
>
> I think we have a group that sees little benefit to spins and another
> that sees a lot of benefit to spins. The former wants to get rid of
> them, the latter wants to keep them. We won't ever quantify the amount
> of benefit they bring so we are probably at a stalemate on the benefit
> question.
>
> On the resources question we can either ask for them in order to allow
> us to do both or we can look for new ways to reduce the cost of spins
> to those complaining about the burden they impose. I'm open to either
> of those approaches. Getting rid of them to me would be an admission
> that are unwilling or unable to continue supporting something that is
> valuable to our users and our community (just my subjective opinion
> and I know not everyone shares it).
>
> John


There is a lot of value in the desktop spins.

Most of the folks I know personally use one spin or another.
I myself REMIX all of the desktop spins for my embedded stuff, and I
personally use MATE and/or XFCE.

It would be disappointing to drop the spins now that we have got them
to such a lofty place in our community.
We now hold them accountable to ensure quality, and the composes are
mostly automated into koji, so burden to keep them going is not much.
Mostly the space they consume is a thing to consider.

I'd like to imagine a day when the KDE spin replaces gnome3 as our
default desktop!
Or even XFCE or whatever....

Do not believe Gnome3 should have lock to the default desktop offering.
I would even go so far to propose a vote from the community every once
in a while to decide what is our so-called default.
And repeat that vote every once in a while... based on merits.

So I'd rather not see the desktop spins go away.
Not sure about the other spins, the pen testing, or software-stack
type things....
Since the burden is mostly storage, and storage is cheap... I tend to
think we can keep them going for now.
There is the part about mirroring, and the time it takes to compose
these things.

My two cents.

-Jon Disnard
FAS: parasense
IRC: masta


-- 

-Jon