David Eisenstein wrote:
Michael J. Knox wrote:
David Woodhouse wrote:
[snip]
The default MTA should be included in Core, and the others should be in
Extras unless they provide functionality which isn't available from the
default MTA.
[snip]
+1 on that reasoning. However, the road to a concluse agreement on which
app to provide the said functionality in core, I doubt, will be easy :)
But then again... does it really matter? The goal is to have the lines
between FE and FC to be pretty much transparent for the end user, so
when I build a server and install postfix if it comes from FE instead of
FC I couldn't care
I have a problem with this so-called "goal" to have the lines between
Fedora Extras and Fedora Core become pretty much transparent for the end
user. If this is a goal, I am not seeing us going about it in a compre-
hensive way.
What end-user(s) are we talking about here?
Some folks do not have broadband Internet connections. They have dialup
internet of 40 kbps download speed at best. Some users may not even have
*any* network connection. How, then, is Fedora Extras useful to them,
unless it, too, is packaged somehow on physical media alongside Core? Does
Fedora have that as a goal?
Did you see the already existing threads on this? Yes - Fedora Extras on
media is a goal.
Further -- I see much glibness about saying, "Throw this over to extras.
Throw that over to extras. Extras can take care of it." I understand
there appears to be some community-wide consensus that it is a "Good
Thing"®™ to reduce the size of Fedora Core. (I am afraid I don't know
Mr. Extras - can he handle all these new packages?)
Thats because its not Mr.Extras. Its a team of people who have already
committed themselves to maintaining these packages. If noone else is
interested enough to maintain it, that package wouldnt be in the
repository.
But I thought that The Fedora Project was about creating value (and perhaps
attractiveness) to the end-users. What kind of end-user polling or testing
is being consulted here to come up with these decisions as to what the
end-users want and need and don't want in Core? I am seeing lots of
programmers weighing in on the decision-making processes (of what goes and
what stays, for example), but I am not seeing the evidence of any kind of
end-user polling, Usability Testing or other metrics being sought nor applied.
In the back of my mind, I'm beginning to call Fedora a "Programmer-
friendly" distribution.
Who needs users?
We dont need to do usability testing to decide such simple things and
users have already expressed clearly what they want. The different
variables are already well known. An example is outlined in
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UnleashKDE
--
Rahul
