On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Mike McGrath wrote: > The funny thing here is I think spins are a detriment to Fedora. We > pretend they're useful and interesting but they're really not. If we > describe them as "a subset of what is in the Everything/ directory" > which is what they are, they're not at all compelling. If spins are *only* a subset of stuff in Everything/ that can still compose a funtioning OS, then yeah, they aren't really that compelling, since it's basically just a customized package manifest. You could get to the same result with two yum commands. The question is whether or not we've seen any innovations come into existence as a result of different spins -- which allow people to have smaller set of focus that are still useful for them -- or whether or not having a Fedora $FOO spin has been useful from a Marketing point of view. Chitlesh has had a lot of success with the Fedora Electronics Lab spin that would probably not have otherwise happened. The KDE SIG and the KDE Spin has, over the past few years, also been very successful. I have always thought that a "Fedora Crazy Experimental" spin -- which allows folks who want to try to build an OS without a firewall, or with some crazy-different version of a critical package -- and came with tons of warning lights and a marketing drive that associated it with the truly bleeding-edge, playing-with-a-revoluntionary-idea kinds of people could lead to some interesting proof of concepts, or could be used as a way to make a hypothetical and flame-ridden argument on fedora-devel-list into something that is tangible and can be evaluated for real, is a valuable sort of thing. I'd like to ask Christoph Wickert whether the existence of the Spins idea -- even if it's just an acknowledged friendliness in Fedora to Lots Of New Ideas -- helped to make the LXDE work that has been happening a reality, or if they would have gotten to the same place in the same amount of time without Spins. But changing 10 packages from the Desktop spin to something else and giving that Spin a new name -- that isn't particularly valuable. --Max _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
