On 4/21/23 16:15, Solomon Peachy via devel wrote:
On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 11:42:20AM +0200, Aleksandra Fedorova wrote:
That's a slight exaggeration of course, but so is your statement. People
come to Fedora via many ways. But I doubt any of it starts with e-mail
nowadays. And the fact that you don't see newcomers _here_ actually proves
the point, isn't it?
Correlation is not causation.
Distro building isn't "fun", or sexy. There are much more immediately
(and fiscally) rewarding things for "newcomers" to mess with.
Let's not get into a "who would you miss more" competition and work on a
solution which actually helps us to bridge the gap and allows us to
compromise between different use cases.
Oh, I know my contributions here are miniscule, but my point is that
we'd lose a ton of voices that collectively represent a ton of
experience and use cases.
In all seriousness, I would advise you to hang out at the current
discussion.fedoraproject.org and feel the vibe a bit.
You kinda just demonstrated my point -- "hanging out at <new web site>
and feel the vibe" is going to take time, attention, and distruption.
My total available time/attention is fixed, which means this "hanging
out" will have to come at the cost of something else that frankly
matters _more_. And I won't personally gain anything from the effort --
at _best_ it will break even vs what I have now.
No, not really. I advised you to look into it, because you may actually
get more from it personally, than you currently expect. I haven't
proposed it to become a required Fedora activity, I gave you the
unsolicited advice. Which maybe I shouldn't have.
Distributions _are_ cool and sexy. And people have ideas and interest in
them. Some of them are totally wrong and misplaced, some may be very old,
and some are better. But that's how it should be.
I'm sorry, the numbers are _not_ on your side here, not just with Fedora
itself but the bigger picture of distributions in general. It's not
"email" that is keeping folks away, it's the nature of the work. And
_work_ it absolutely is.
And now you try to tell me that "coolness" is defined by numbers. Sorry,
I don't agree. I don't need everyone in the world to work on Linux
distribution. I don't want majority of people to work on Linux
distribution. I don't even need "more than in Ubuntu" people to work on
Fedora Linux distribution. That is not the point at all, and it is not
what makes things cool.
But with my Fedora Ambassador hat on I can tell you that the problem we
see right now is not that we don't have people coming to Fedora. We have
a problem helping people to connect to where the work is happening in a
way that they can contribute.
And this includes both mentoring them to be able to contribute, but also
accepting the fact that new people can bring new ideas, and we should
provide them space to work on them and not just expect them to follow
and do what they were told to do.
(And I say this as someone who has spent most of the past couple of
decades working on low-level infrastructure-type stuff. Sure, I find it
fun/enjoyable but I freely acknowledge I am several standard deviations
from the mean)
It seems you feel like you are cornered, but it is you who put yourself in
the corner by ignoring the part of the community, which actually can and
wants to support you.
By that same token bananas could make themselves more appealing to
people that like oranges if they'd only be more orange-like.
This isn't me "putting myself in a corner", it's Fedora moving the tent
that I was underneath and expecting me to move with it. (Because they
either don't understand _why_ anyone wouldn't want to move, or
understand, and do it anyway. I can actually respect the latter
position, even if I think it's not going to yield the expected results.
But I think this is yet another case of the former)
But whatever, I won't lose any sleep over this. As I already mentioned,
I have plenty of other things to do, both in the F/OSS world and in
(gasp) meatspace where I won't have to look at yet another screen.
[1] Splitting into the "core" developers (ie those paid/compensated for
participating) and an endless summer of newbs seeking help/support;
the middle gets completely hollowed out.
FWIW, I stand by this analogy.
The middle doesn't magically appear out of nowhere. It appears when you
build paths for newbies to grow into it. And it it sort of
responsibility of the current middle to grow the next one.
We think the communication channels change is one of the initiatives
which helps with that. Mentorship is the other.
There are currently three initiatives under Sustainable Community
objective and everyone's feedback is welcome:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-strategy-2028-focus-area-review-community-sustainability/79277
- Solomon
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