Is the Fedora Server one product?

[Simo Sorce]

On Fri, 2013-11-01 at 10:08 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> Greetings you all
> 
> So here's the thing throughout Fedora history there has always been the 
> attempt to put a one label ( target users ) on the entire community and 
> always has it failed ( understandably so ) and trying to do so here in 
> the form of an single "PRD" for the server community will fail in the 
> same manner since each of the existing server application or application 
> stack exist to address a particular problem or fill in a missing space 
> in the IT sector which means each of this exist to address *different* 
> set of target audience thus we will never be able to .
> 
> In anycase people have failed to realise this all this after all these 
> years and still try to put one label on everything in a such a diverse 
> community ( and in our case the server aspect of the project ) and since 
> I suck at writing analogies or explain why that is people simply have to 
> come to conclusion by themselves.
> 
> Now what I believe what we stand for, what our true purpose is, our 
> core, our essence, our mission statement Fedora Server WG can be 
> summarized into this one sentence...
> 
> "Fedora Server WG where we discover product solutions that work well for 
> our users, our administrators, our developers and our project."
> --> T-shirt anyone <-- ;)
> 
> We should be identifying which server applications work well on their 
> own or work well with each other out of those 500+ we have ( think of 
> them as ingredients ).
> 
> Once we have done that we add a Fedora secret sauce ( what we feel they 
> are lacking for the 21 century which for example could be that missing 
> configuration api ) and form a PRD for that recipe and implement it.
> 
> In anycase that's my view and we need to hash out if people think of 
> "Fedora server" as single product and an PRD can be applied to it as 
> such or multiple products.

Jóhann,
I've been in the integration business since forever, starting many, many
years ago when I was a simple Unix administrator.

What you say is not at all w/o merit, but I do not think it is the goal
of the Server WG. Integrating applications is easier said than done, and
takes a lot of time, and can't be done in isolation.

I think we should definitely look at the big picture, and do the best we
can to provide defaults, configurations or guides, to make as many
components as possible play together. But it is not our core mission to
go and modify single components. I think our mission is more to interact
with upstream and tell them what we think would greatly improve the
situation for us and encourage them to provide those changes. In
exchange we should react fast when they provide us what we asked,
backporting or rebasing packages fast so upstream can see the changes
requested flow rapidly into Fedora Server, with the hope of creating
positive feedback loops.

I think what we want to do primarily though is build a foundation for
all the interesting projects to run on. Provide the best possible,
solid, core OS, people can depend on, where changes are pondered not
only against the benefit they can bring to new admins but also how
disruptive they would be to developers and existing admins. Our duty is
to provide excellent transition tools for those times when disruptive
change is necessary w/o having the ecosystem suffer for multiple
releases.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York