Fedora plasma and Fedora scientific

[Kevin Kofler]

Amit Saha wrote:
> I am the maintainer of the Fedora Scientific Spin [1,2]. Only this
> morning, a colleague brought my attention to the Fedora Plasma product.
> Just glancing through the PRD [3], I can see quite a bit of overlap in the
> objectives and audience of both.

We are still discussing whether we want to move forward with the Plasma 
Product as currently proposed in the first place.

The current proposal is something in the middle between the current KDE spin 
and the current Scientific spin, and IMHO it would be a poor replacement for 
at least one of them, if not for both. I'd expect a scientific Product to 
ship scientific applications ON the live image, but that makes the image 
huge and much less interesting for other user groups. I'm a scientist 
myself, but I don't think forcing our scientific applications on all KDE 
users by default is going to fly (but neither is NOT shipping those 
applications on a Product which claims to be science-oriented going to fly).

Another issue is, what if somebody comes up with a great new scientific 
application that is not KDE-based? Would we still want to feature that 
application? (From a science standpoint, we would, from a KDE standpoint, 
probably not.) Right now, all the flagship applications I can think of 
happen to be KDE- or Qt-based (kdeedu apps, Kile, LyX etc.; if we also 
target educational applications for young children, there's also GCompris 
that is being ported to Qt), but that could change. You already ship (or 
used to ship) some non-KDE stuff like Eclipse (whose relevance to science 
eludes me, to be honest) on your Scientific spin.

The proposal in its current state mainly came up as a compromise attempt 
because several FESCo and Board members are opposed to another workstation-
focused Product and thus want to see a different target user base, but they 
are still not happy with the proposal as it stands now, and IMHO we already 
compromised too much.

        Kevin Kofler