Well, that was a spirited and wide-ranging discussion I kicked off. Not exactly surprising, but somewhat tangential at times. I thought I'd try and summarize a few things here and bring some focus back. Here are some themes that were brought up in the previous thread. 1) Workstation should use $DE This is fine, and it's the basis of my original thread. We need to evaluate which DE we want, why we think it's best positioned, and move forward. 2) Workstation means the end of alternative DEs This is very much untrue. Other DE Spins exist today, and I believe that the WG members would like to see them continue to exist. That's not to say the WG could even make them go away, but instead it's to illustrate that Workstation isn't meant to discourage or prevent other interesting work from happening. The members of the WG clearly see value in such work, and it should continue. The Workstation product cannot dictate what people work on, and frankly if we dropped all other DEs from Fedora entirely I would probably move on. We need alternatives both to satisfy the people that clearly love them and to provide counter-points to whatever DE the WG picks. 3) Workstation (and Fedora.next) is just more of the same Fedora I'd be willing to allow that at first glance it could look like that. However, the picking of a DE is the _starting_ point for the product. The actual difference in terms of presentation, technical stability, etc only comes after we have one thing to focus on. The DE, frankly, is the least interesting part of the ideas around what the Product should be. So yes, there will likely be some overlap between today's Fedora and Fedora.next, but that is because Fedora.next is supposed to be improvement on top of the massive body of work Fedora has already done. Starting from scratch with a radical new approach to everything seems counter-productive to me. 4) Workstation should use all DEs interchangeably This might be an eventual possibility, but it's not something we can feasible accomplish from the start. Personally, I don't think it's a good idea overall because worrying about all DEs (or the most popular ones) at the same time means you explode your design, development, and testing requirements. That isn't going to help get a product out the door. Combine that with the fact that other DE Spins can and should exist, and it allows the WG to focus on the product while letting those other Spins progress on their own. 5) This is upstream GNOME just taking over I don't believe anyone actually said that verbatim, but it seems implied in several replies. Firstly, I suggested GNOME as the underlying DE for the same reasons Fedora has primarily chosen it as the default offering. That's it. Secondly, we have WG members that have already said they believe Workstation needs to set it's own goals and agenda, and will deviate where necessary from upstream. I believe that applies to any DE chosen, including GNOME. ----- So, we really kind of need to settle on something and get started. This is just the first technical item to decide, and then we need to asses it's impacts on the repositories (anything missing/need changing), how we're going to test it, the impacts on other teams, etc. Ultimately it's up to the WG members to vote on, and I think we should likely hold a vote next week. Let's aim for a call for voting next Monday. josh -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
