On Thu, 2013-11-28 at 09:01 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote: > On 27 November 2013 21:28, Adam Williamson <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > to a rough approximation, no-one likes gnome-packagekit > > What a way to be awesome. Okay, a bit harsh, but c'mon...it's kinda true. This isn't really your fault, because you're spread so thin you don't have time to make it a really great app (as you note below). I just see it as a consequence of Fedora's dev cycle and resource allocations: we just don't consider it that important to have a great graphical package manager. > >GNOME Software is a classic Fedora feature: in F20, it's there and it just about manages the most basic functions. > > You know what, I don't know why I bother. Do you know what the > alternative is? A developer goes into a cave, and comes out two years > later with a finished design and implementation that cannot be > changed. Real (not theoretical) users try to use the finished code, > and find it unsuitable for X, Y, Z reasons. I thought Fedora was *all > about* release early, release often? > > If I had 5 people working on software and application management full > time we could have done something better than gnome-packagekit years > before, and we certainly could have prototyped, designed, implemented > and tested a working offline update in less than 6 months. But the > reality was that until very recently we had a toxic environment for > the package stack with an unstable API that nobody was allowed to > alter (remember the debacle with Zif?) and a single person (me) > working about one day a week on the whole middleware and UI stack. > > Anyway, I best get back to writing confusing code. Sorry, Richard, I was hoping the mail wouldn't read that way to someone involved in one of the things I highlighted as 'prototype' examples, because that wasn't my intent. I debated including a sideline on this, but decided against it because it would make an already-long mail even longer. Still, obviously I should have done, so here it is. I saw this as kind of a subtext to my mail, but obviously it wasn't clear enough. The things I identified as examples of Fedora's prototype-y approach were _just that_: examples of the prototype-y approach. I didn't intend to suggest that they were Objectively Bad Things, or that the people involved in doing those things made the wrong decisions or were incompetent. I actually agree precisely with what you wrote above, Richard - "I thought Fedora was *all about* release early, release often?" - and the point I was trying to convey with my mail is that I think Fedora is actually _intentionally_ this kind of 'prototype project', and I don't think that's inherently a bad thing...but it's a major reason why we don't get more 'mass market' / 'regular' users, and we have to be aware of that. The goals of 'have an aggressive release cycle, develop big new features and release them as early as possible, generally push the envelope' and 'develop a mass user base' are at least to an extent mutually exclusive. Again, though, I'm not trying to suggest that I think we don't know what we're doing, or that the prototype approach is the wrong approach. My _personal_ opinion is actually that the prototype approach is a good, useful and interesting thing for Fedora to be doing, and we should think very hard before moving away from it. So again, sorry to give the wrong impression, and I wasn't actually trying to suggest that I think we should have landed GNOME Software later or worked harder on GPK in the last few years or whatever. That wasn't the intent of bringing up that example. I was just trying to highlight that we need to make sure all our thinking is joined-up: it doesn't necessarily make sense for this group to be having this PRD discussion which (at least by my reading) seems informed by a desire to broaden the Fedora user base without considering this question of Fedora's 'prototype' approach. And if we all agree that the 'prototype' nature of Fedora is a key part of Fedora's identity that we want to retain, we need to recognize that that places significant limitations on our ability to go in some of the directions this whole three-product-proposal appears to be heading. As I said, I actually quite enjoy the prototype approach and think it is a good thing, long term, for the whole ecosystem. If there wasn't a project like Fedora which pushes the envelope, pushes out new technologies quickly and provides a nearly-stable environment to whack them all against each other and see where the sparks fly, I think that would be bad for the ecosystem: it would slow down development and cause more friction between developers trying to push new stuff and a relatively conservative set of distros trying to provide a stable user-friendly experience. I think by being the envelope-pushing distro, Fedora provides a valuable service to _everyone_. But being that distro comes with consequences that we have to keep in mind. Releasing Fedora 20 with GNOME Software in its current state is exactly the right call for Fedora-as-I-see-it, Fedora the 'prototype project'. It's the classic example of what Fedora does; we put it out there as early as possible, and that helps us work out the kinks. It would be the wrong call for Fedora-as-an-attempt-to-build-a-credible-end-user-OS, and that's why I brought it up in a specific context in my original email, because I was kinda invoking hypotheticals. But I don't want to suggest it's a bad project or F20 shouldn't include it or anyone's making bad calls, because I don't think that. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
