On Tue, 2013-12-03 at 09:10 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote: > 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. Well if that's where people want to go, it's where they want to go. But in that case, I'd suggest we'd need to discuss the stuff I raised: fiddling around the edges of product definitions and target audiences and our exact set of deliverables is all well and good, but as long as we have the Change policies, release cycle, approach to 'stability', and quality tolerances we're currently sporting, we're not going to be building viable products. Personally I'd be a bit sad to start building Ford Focuses, and I do worry about the long-term implications of there no longer being a major distro with a large number of associated talented upstream developers where you can do big change fast. But it's certainly a choice we can make. -- 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
