Colin Walters wrote: > On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Tom spot Callaway <tcallawa@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On 2009-02-18 at 17:14:12 -0500, Colin Walters <walters@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> The other thing to we should do is to strongly discourage people from >>> adding more of them to Fedora. There's not a really good reason for >>> anything other than gdm and kdm to be included and supported. >> I'm not sure I buy this argument. Who gets to say what use cases are >> interesting to the Fedora Community? What if the next great window >> manager isn't GNOME or KDE? > > I very strongly believe that something like Fedora can't be an > abstract project to put as many different pieces of software into RPM > form as possible, regardless of what kind of software it is and the > ramifications for the layers involved. Instead, it should be focused > on a product or goal - desktop and server images being good choices. > And the question is how does the work involved impact those products. > On the contrary, I believe that we'd be cutting off the lifeblood of Fedora to make it focus on a few distinct products. Fedora derives its contributor base from the fact that there are many people who are each willing and enthusiastic about working on different things. As much as possible, we should be attempting to get these people to interact and work on their projects inside of Fedora even when the goals conflict with each other. That's not to say there shouldn't be groups within Fedora focused on making a product out of the mixture of different individual and micro-project goals. The Fedora release is a focal point for our energies that gives a time frame and structure to our individual tasks. But making the whole Project conform to the goal of producing a Desktop Spin and a Server Spin is missing out on Fedora's strength. Fedora needs to be more than the release. It needs to be about building up a community of developers who can, at least tolerate each other and work on ways to make their different goals and visions cohabit under the Fedora umbrella. Getting too focused on Fedora, the distribution, means that we might have a superior Desktop experience or a superior Server OS but it doesn't mean that we'll have a rich base of contributors who are willing to build new and imperfect software to replace the old and imperfect software that we currently run. It doesn't mean that we'll continue to be innovative or willing to be on the cutting edge. It doesn't mean that we'll be able to attract a large and diverse group of active contributors. Software becomes quickly dated; progress marches on. In twenty years, I don't want to be part the team that created a Linux distribution back in the noughts; I want to be one of the members of the group that have used their experiences to make each other better problem solvers, programmers, and system admins that can get good results even when we're put in charge of the local herd of cats. -Toshio -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
