On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I know all that. That does not make anything more clear. The way the > decision was made, communicated (I had to ask twice!) and basically > punted to another group to make IS NOT CLEAR. I agree with Josh that the communication was not clear. The intention was not to simply throw roadblocks in Christoph's path, or to simply push the responsibility of the decision onto someone else. I thought we had stated this quite clearly in the Board meetings the past couple of weeks, but we obviously didn't do a good job of communicating that externally. When I realized on Monday afternoon that there was still a lot of confusion, I made an effort to reach out to Christoph to help explain the rationale behind the Board's decision. Christoph and I had what I considered to be a healthy and productive phone conversation on Monday afternoon, and I think he better understands where the Fedora Board sits on this issue, and knows what he needs to do to move forward with his proposal. In the interest of better communication, let me share a bit with you some of the things that Christoph and I discussed: 1) First and foremost (as has been repeated by several people in various active threads on the advisory-board list), part of what makes Fedora awesome is the ability to be a pioneer and try new ideas in a very creative community. Innovation rarely happens in committee -- innovation usually happens when somebody says "I wonder if this would work..." and then goes out and tries something new or different. Fedora should be an inviting community where cross-pollination and creativity flourish. 2) That being said, we need to balance that with the desire to make sure that releases and release media going out to end users reflect well on Fedora as a whole. In short, this encompasses things such as "Fedora-sponsored media should be built on Fedora and by Fedora" and "We should provide consistent messaging across our release media." If it's worth going to the effort to make a bunch of DVDs to hand out at shows and conferences, it's worth putting in a little extra effort to ensure that the deliverable is documented, repeatable, and raptor-proof. This is the reason we asked Christoph to provide a "how-to" on how the ISO gets built, and to work with Rel-Eng to have the ISO built within Fedora's infrastructure. (From what I understand, we're talking about ten shell commands here -- It doesn't seem to be very complicated to me.) We also asked Christoph to make some slight changes to the wording on the DVD cover, such that new users will know what to expect when they see a boot menu with lots of different options. 3) We also discussed the concern that putting several different spins on the ISO isn't ideal, but is one short-term solution to a larger problem. Christoph and I and the Board seem to be in agreement that we'd like to work together to find a more elegant solution to the problem. Is having completely separate spins just for different desktop environments ideal? Can we move the selection of desktop environments into the installer? Is there a better solution? I have no doubt that we can find a solution that's more appealing to everyone -- but in the meantime, code speaks louder than words, and I don't want to hold up "good" in the name of "perfect". We all know that software is an iterative process. I see this as an iterative process as well. 4) Obviously timing is an important consideration here as well. I would have loved to have had this conversation earlier in the F14 release cycle, but we are where we are in the cycle. I don't want to but any additional burden on the Rel-Eng team. My suggestion to Christoph was to try to work with Rel-Eng to produce the ISO as soon after the F14 release as possible, when they should be easier for them to give it the attention it deserves. Christoph seemed OK with this. We'll see how Rel-Eng feels about it, and try to move forward. To avoid this timing problem in the future, we suggested that all new official media types should be documented and organized by the beta of the next release, so as to give all the teams involved (Rel-Eng, Design, Documentation, Marketing, etc.) the chance to work their magic. Christoph seems willing to do a little extra work to make the ISO better. I'm willing to help him, where I can. -- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
