server branch idea [was Re: Five basic principles ...]

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 09:29:42PM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> > Really? 'Cause I was going with your "separate branch" idea....
> I thought you were against it? From your posts to my blog you seemed
> against it.

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound entirely against it. Actually, I think the
idea answers a lot of questions nicely. (Like, not least of all, how can we
stop arguing and _get some cool stuff done_?) 

But the idea of _aspiring_ to a common base is something I'd like to see as
a cornerstone of a server branch project [¹]. Where we need to deviate from
the main project, I'd rather be the kind of fork that says: we hope this can
all be merged together again soon.

Reasons for that can tie in nicely to the Fedora slogan -- freedom: yes we
can do this kind of thing; friends: it works best if we can work together as
a community, not as two separate projects; features: sure, we want cool
stuff in the server branch too, but we need to be more cautious, so we'll
move towards them more slowly; first: by keeping our use cases from being
blockers, we can let the main distro do more radical things more quickly,
and still probably get them before other server distributions.

Eehhhhh. Or something like that. :)

And of course, on a pragmatic level, the less we split, the less new work
there is to be done.

...

1. And in return I'd like to see some of the basic principles necessary for
that at least *recognized* as valuable by the broader project too.

-- 
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional & Research Computing Services
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences