On 26 January 2014 21:11, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Antila > <crantila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > [snip] > > >> Problem 1: with a "Spin," we can't accomplish everything we wanted (e.g., no >> realtime kernel, no MP3 support). > > Is the real-time kernel still an issue? Sure, in the days of slow > machines, 32-bit x86 and low-end sound cards it might have been a > problem, but really - with a 2 GHz 64-bit chip and audio cards that do > the heavy lifting, is the real-time kernel still needed? > Not much, though one thing needed for real time, group setup, isn't possible through a spin. Not sure what the situation is about the priority settings, think that's been sorted. > MP3 - the other distros get around that by paying money to other > businesses. Google and Mozilla are slowly but surely hacking away at > the need for MP3. We'll get there, maybe even in my lifetime. Firefox > OS doesn't support FLAC, for example. ;-) > This is a problem, mp3 might be on the way out (and the patents should expire fairly soon anyway), but it's already been replaced by things like AAC which will take longer to die. Opus is fairly hopeful since lots of big players have supported it. A way for people to buy into or sign up for plugins they need that aren't included would be great, but that's already been tried with the fluendo stuff. >> Problem 2: we didn't get the additional contributors we hoped for. > Packaging is labor-intensive and capital-intensive. That's why I don't do it. > >> Problem 3: even the contributors don't use or recommend the Spin. I installed >> the F19 spin, but I wouldn't do it again, because it's just not what I want, >> in the same way the Desktop Spin and the KDE Spin aren't what I want. > Well, I have two hobbies - algorithmic composition / digital sound > synthesis and data / computational journalism. So no single spin > covers both and my machine is basically Fedora Design Suite plus R and > R Studio plus the packages from the Jam spin. > I'm using the spin! On two computers! Though if it went away I'd install the KDE spin and add packages. That's probably not enough users to count as 'accomplished social goals'. >> Problem 4: we don't have enough contributors to do what we want---or we want >> to do more than we can. > Nobody has enough 'contributors', where 'contributors' == 'people who > work for love instead of money' ;-) > >> Problem 5: pulling ourselves into the Fedora community necessarily means we >> restrict what we can do, both technically and legally. > I don't think that's really a problem - I'd rather have Fedora's > restrictions than Ubuntu's chaos and all the other distros' lack of > already-packaged audio solutions. > >> I'll propose some solutions too. Because the spin didn't and can't accomplish >> our technical goals, because it hasn't accomplished our social goals, because >> we don't seem to be using our own work, and because it's causing additional >> effort when we can't afford it, let's drop the spin. That's an easy first step. > I'd still like to see a yum package group/groups salvaged from the > kickstart file. > What are the technical goals? Might help to have what people's aims are. The yum package group might actually be a good thing, it'd be available to more fedora users and is pretty much all that can be accomplished through a spin anyway. Technically the thing I care about most is having pulse and jack work smoothly together, that and having a mixer that works. There are other things, DAW, light audio players and editors (dragon is quite nice, audacity is pretty handy), some synths and drums for messing with. (Oh, and if I could figure out why having a rocksmith cable plugged in causes xruns though Jack's not using it. Money so far is on USB oddness.) I recently acquired a raspberry pi. I'm wondering if it's capable of running guitarix (probably not, but yet to try). > [snip] > >> But what comes next? (Or: what comes .next?) We may need to leave Fedora. >> >> Like Brendan, and probably many of you, I really appreciate the Fedora >> community's published values. However, through my time here, I've begun to >> realize that Fedora is the upstream for RHEL, the Fedora community is for >> innovating in the cloud, and if something isn't going to make money for Red >> Hat, there usually isn't enough initiative to make it happen (or: these >> initiatives get clobbered by the contributors who have more time because >> they're paid by Red Hat). >> >> Let me clarify that I honestly believe everybody is acting in good faith, and >> that Red Hat's influence is overall a positive thing for the Fedora community >> and Linux in general. This is a "tyranny of the majority" situation: what's >> best for accomplishing our needs and desires is different from what's best for >> accomplishing the needs and desires of most of the rest of the Fedora >> community. > > If we 'leave Fedora' there are essentially two options: > 1. We join the throng of 'labor of love / no product-market fit' audio > distros based on Debian or Ubuntu, competing for scarce resources with > them, or > 2. We migrate to openSUSE, where there's a huge infrastructure in the > OpenSUSE Build Service and SUSE Studio, and try to find a paying > market. > I basically use Fedora because I'm much happier with the way it's engineered than Ubuntu. Maybe we need to speak to the RPMfusion people? Not being able to point people to resources that cause problems for Fedora is quite a handicap, though quite a lot of us are based outside the madness of the US patent system. I think what we're missing is somewhere that the community can provide instructions and tutorials that isn't dependent on Fedora infrastructure so Fedora can be clear of responsibility. Fedora + RPMfusion + CCRMA is actually great. -- imalone http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk _______________________________________________ music mailing list music@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/music
