On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 13:28 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote: [ replying to old mail here - catching up from Thanksgiving ] [ ... lots of accurate case studies elided ... ] > When people ask me to describe Fedora's niche, I tend to say that we > make a prototype of something that could be a really great operating > system a year later. But we never stop and turn it into a really great > operating system: instead we introduce another dozen shiny things that > aren't quite finished yet and turn out another prototype. We never build > a Toyota Corolla, we're perpetually building motor show prototypes - > something with all sorts of shiny amazing features that isn't really > intended to work satisfactorily in the real world. We're not interested > in doing the last 20% of boring work to turn our super-exciting > prototype into something Joe Normal will drive to work every day: we > just want to keep building more super-exciting prototypes. > > This kind of stuff is the reason more people don't use Fedora. If we > slowed down our pace of development and improved our documentation and > our quality standards, we would likely build something that more people > wanted to use...and we wouldn't necessarily need the three-product > proposal or the WGs to achieve that. It's something that we could > theoretically do under that new model, _or_ under our old model. It's > not really a part of the current proposals. > > *but*, I'm not saying that's actually what we should do. I quite like > building exciting prototypes. Building Corollas probably ain't as much > fun. Still, there is an obvious corollary; I think it's vitally > important that in any debate which touches on this question, we bear the > above in mind. No matter how we re-arrange our deliverables or talk > about 'target audiences' and the like, as long as we maintain our > current focus on building lots of shiny new things and landing them as > soon as we possibly can and releasing often and not sweating the small > stuff, we are building prototypes, and we're not going to get a mass > user base. So I think it would be a mistake to make decisions as a part > of this process based on the idea that we're trying to make Fedora a > credible operating system for 'regular folks' *or* for 'developers' who > want a stable, reliable operating system more than they want the latest > shiny version of absolutely everything, *without* addressing the more > fundamental stuff I'm talking about above. I think this is what the three-product WGs are all about, I'm afraid: Getting away from continuous distraction by the next shiny thing, move the quality threshold way up, and deliver products instead of prototypes. -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
