Hi everyone! Since it's a new year and a new decade [*], it seems like a good time to look forward and talk about what we want the Fedora Project to be in the next five and even ten years. How do we take the awesome foundation we have now and build and grow and make something that continues to thrive and be useful, valuable, and fun? [My thoughts below. Feel free to respond to those, or cut here and start your own!] I see three big themes I think we need to tackle. First, I'd like to see Fedora become more of an "operating system factory". The direction we took with the Fedora Editions has been a success — Fedora's general growth and popularity bears that out. But now it's a good time to re-examine the positioning. The Editions were meant to fit big, broad use-cases defined by (at the time) the Fedora Board and FESCo. Since then, everything's become more complicated, with Atomic and then CoreOS, and IoT, and Silverblue — and we never really found a satisfying way to present the work of our other desktop SIGs. So, I think we should revisit the top-level design for Get Fedora. I'm not a designer and I don't have a particular answer in mind, but I think we should try an approach which showcases all of our different outputs in some way which also makes it easy for new users to find the right solution quickly (and to understand the support options and expecations for their choice). In support of that, I'd like to also have that page steer people into tooling for creating new spins —- and I'd like to see us invest in and rebuild the spin creation processes. (Particularly, I'd like spin releases to be decoupled from the main OS release, and for those to be self-service by their SIGs with minimal rel-eng involvement needed.) Second, we need to figure out how to work with language-native packaging formats and more directly with code that's distributed in git repos rather than as tarball releases. We're not adding meaningful end-user value by manually repackaging these in our own format. We _do_ add value by vetting licenses and insuring availability and consistency, but I think we can find better ways to do that. I think the "source git" project is an interesting step here. These two things are linked. I want application developers to find Fedora a convenient and easy way to get their software to users. Pulling from the Fedora container and flatpak registries should give the same feeling of trust and safety that installing and RPM from our repos does today. We're not going to get either of those things with the system we have now. Our value is unclear to both developers and end users, so we just get left out. If we don't address this, we're ultimately going to be reduced to a barely-differentiated implementation of a base OS that no one really cares about, not the rich software ecosystem we've always aspired to build. Third, we really need to continue to grow the project as more than coding and packaging. Obviously that engineering work is the core of the project (and we should grow that too!), but it doesn't matter what we build if no one can find it or find how to use it. We need to feed and grow our documentation and support communities around the world. Marie (our new FCAIC, in case you missed that!) and I have been talking about this, and we hope to really expand the $150-mini-event Mindshare program in the next year, and hopefully build on that further in the coming ones. Those are my thoughts. What other challenges and opportunities do you see, and what would you like us to focus on? ---- [*] https://www.xkcd.com/2249/ (Also, on a more personal note: I've been SUPER swamped with email. If you sent me something over the holiday break and I didn't answer, it's not you, it's me. If I dropped something important, please send again. I'm declaring email bankrupcy and starting the year fresh.) -- Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
