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
On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 8:54 AM, Josh Boyer jwboyer@fedoraproject.org wrote:
So, we really kind of need to settle on something and get started.
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange - it's a bit like having a friend who suddenly meets someone else they find interesting, and maybe you get a polite wave when you're passing.
You'd be left wondering what you did wrong...
Now of course there has been a lot of feedback - sometimes intense amounts, but there is simply not enough engineering time to even hope to address more than a small percentage of it.
There needs to be a functional feedback mechanism that separates the high-priority targets clearly.
Further, I really dislike the mindset where it's all about switching between pre-formed but completely different things. There is a whole spectrum of options in between, such as small forking.
I think this is something where technology drives culture - packages *punish* forking - you have to tediously rename all of the upstream source code so that the files don't stomp on each other, just for the completely obscure use case of having multiple desktops "installed" at the same time.
Which then in turn makes it *much, much harder* to merge back. Instead, packages reward writing completely new implementations. Of course, I come at this from the OSTree perspective, which makes it pretty easy to have scalable branches that you can switch between, instead of requiring co-installation.
And finally, the relative omission of the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 has *already forked* in this discussion is kind of odd, to say the least. Personally I think classic mode is a visible symbol of the malfunctioning feedback mechanism. Or really, not even feedback - it should be about cooperation, with actual *code* flowing both ways.
On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters walters@verbum.org wrote:
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy. I think we're kidding ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts of the stack that GNOME uses. If I remember correctly, we have about two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on MATE. Fedora may be a community distro, but without the backing of Red Hat, it wouldn't be viable at all. When there's a Fedora release blocker that needs a few days of developer time, who do you think picks up the tab? I think that's probably an important thing to understand before damaging the relationship any further on votes that can only result in huge flame wars and a lot of wasted time.
Richard [*]
* Red Hat employee, but you probably knew that.
On 02/10/2014 11:09 AM, Richard Hughes wrote:
On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters walters@verbum.org wrote:
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy.
Why is that so crazy?
Mean why is not the workstation role a role that desktop environment can transition too chooses they do to so?
Hmm perhaps i should try to form that question differently which pehaps sheds a better light as I see it.
Now that the "Default desktop" role will be vacated with Gnome that has served that role being moved to "Workstation role" leaving any other of the DE to apply for the now vacant Default Desktop role how is that different from allowing them to transition to workstation role?
I think we're kidding ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts of the stack that GNOME uses.
Irrelevant since those contribution happen upstream by our sponsor and for as long as I can remember more or less everyone part of the Gnome desktop team have *always* wanted us to move reports etc upstream so when an claim is made that we benefit *directly* from our sponsor can you clarify how that directly is being done in our downstream distribution in other words what are those Fedora specific bits by those order of magnitudes are *directly* bringing to the project.
If I remember correctly, we have about two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on MATE.
Again irrelevant those community's are larger then a single or several Red Hat employees
Fedora may be a community distro, but without the backing of Red Hat, it wouldn't be viable at all.
Arguable because we have not ( indirectly through trademark ) be allowed to seek outside sponsorship.
When there's a Fedora release blocker that needs a few days of developer time, who do you think picks up the tab? I think that's probably an important thing to understand before damaging the relationship any further on votes that can only result in huge flame wars and a lot of wasted time.
Each "product" will have to have their own release criteria and be blocked accordingly as well as releasing on different schedule for this whole multi product proposal to work afaikt so I dont see how that's relevant.
JBG
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 11:28:16AM +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On 02/10/2014 11:09 AM, Richard Hughes wrote:
On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters walters@verbum.org wrote:
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy.
Why is that so crazy?
Mean why is not the workstation role a role that desktop environment can transition too chooses they do to so?
Hmm perhaps i should try to form that question differently which pehaps sheds a better light as I see it.
Now that the "Default desktop" role will be vacated with Gnome that has served that role being moved to "Workstation role" leaving any other of the DE to apply for the now vacant Default Desktop role how is that different from allowing them to transition to workstation role?
The idea of Fedora.next and the separate products is not to keep the same default product, plus add others, but rather transition to a new model. Sorry if that was unclear.
I think we're kidding ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts of the stack that GNOME uses.
Irrelevant since those contribution happen upstream by our sponsor and for as long as I can remember more or less everyone part of the Gnome desktop team have *always* wanted us to move reports etc upstream so when an claim is made that we benefit *directly* from our sponsor can you clarify how that directly is being done in our downstream distribution in other words what are those Fedora specific bits by those order of magnitudes are *directly* bringing to the project.
The integration efforts are performed directly in Fedora. We benefit directly from those efforts. The fact that the software works well as a result in other distros or combinations is an added benefit and a result of FOSS methodology.
If I remember correctly, we have about two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on MATE.
Again irrelevant those community's are larger then a single or several Red Hat employees
Not irrelevant since a product is a result of good integration effort, not just vanilla combinations of upstream. One of the main benefits of a more focused approach is getting beyond that result.
Fedora may be a community distro, but without the backing of Red Hat, it wouldn't be viable at all.
Arguable because we have not ( indirectly through trademark ) be allowed to seek outside sponsorship.
We do have outside sponsorship. http://fedoraproject.org/ will show you sponsorships by non-Red Hat entities.
When there's a Fedora release blocker that needs a few days of developer time, who do you think picks up the tab? I think that's probably an important thing to understand before damaging the relationship any further on votes that can only result in huge flame wars and a lot of wasted time.
Each "product" will have to have their own release criteria and be blocked accordingly as well as releasing on different schedule for this whole multi product proposal to work afaikt so I dont see how that's relevant.
No such details have been determined yet by the WGs. Even if it was the case that different schedules were needed, I can't imagine this project is unable to figure out how to mitigate those issues through coordinating the various cadences, or some other solution. Rather, it seems to me the point of handling blockers is directly relevant to releases. We wouldn't want to release despite them.
On 02/10/2014 08:38 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
The idea of Fedora.next and the separate products is not to keep the same default product, plus add others, but rather transition to a new model. Sorry if that was unclear.
Are you saying that only these three working groups can and will be promoted leaving no room for other "official" released and promoted desktop products to (co)exist?
You must realize that laptop/desktop experience is not the same as "workstation" experience so our community members might want release product(s) that targets that end user market even another Gnome release ( which kinda has been done via dvd install of Gnome which was more workstation oriented then the live which was more desktop/laptop oriented ).
JBG
I want to make an OS, not to read statistics all day. If you want to read statistics and conduct research, feel free to do it on your own time, and don't waste mine with meaningless messages to a public list.
I'm not on the Working Group, I don't work for Red Hat, it's not my job to do research and analyze data, that's their job and nobody's doing it. Where's the data that backs up all of these decisions? That's all I'm asking. Nobody has even bothered to write a formal research report or even reference reports from organizations like the IDC or even articles on Wikipedia. Google makes data driven decisions based on rational logic. So does Apple and their success shows this. Microsoft has made poor choices because of internal politics and because they ignored the data.
We chose GNOME because it's the most viable solution to this problem, it's not about friends or about pleasing people with money, it's about what makes sense to this project in terms of technology, stability, quality and manpower.
What you're saying is that Fedora Workstation is no different from any other Linux desktop project. Walking randomly blindfolded on the basis of pleasing one's friends. It's obvious that the decision is highly emotional and not a rationally well thought out one. This has never worked for any project. You almost convinced me that Fedora.next and the "products" approach would finally lead to a logical Linux desktop for Fedora. But now I'm no longer convinced. In fact I'm now a skeptic of this process and don't think it'll lead to meaningful and productive change.
The skeptics are right, Red Hat only cares about the server, the desktop is just a byproduct...
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 7:39 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg@gmail.com
wrote:
On 02/10/2014 08:38 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
The idea of Fedora.next and the separate products is not to keep the same default product, plus add others, but rather transition to a new model. Sorry if that was unclear.
Are you saying that only these three working groups can and will be promoted leaving no room for other "official" released and promoted desktop products to (co)exist?
You must realize that laptop/desktop experience is not the same as "workstation" experience so our community members might want release product(s) that targets that end user market even another Gnome release ( which kinda has been done via dvd install of Gnome which was more workstation oriented then the live which was more desktop/laptop oriented ).
JBG
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 20:07 -0500, Alex GS wrote:
I want to make an OS, not to read statistics all day. If you want to read statistics and conduct research, feel free to do it on your own time, and don't waste mine with meaningless messages to a public list.
I'm not on the Working Group, I don't work for Red Hat, it's not my job to do research and analyze data, that's their job and nobody's doing it. Where's the data that backs up all of these decisions? That's all I'm asking. Nobody has even bothered to write a formal research report or even reference reports from organizations like the IDC or even articles on Wikipedia. Google makes data driven decisions based on rational logic. So does Apple and their success shows this. Microsoft has made poor choices because of internal politics and because they ignored the data.
But we are not a company (like Google or Apple), we are a community project. So the data we want to make a decision like this shouldn't be just from users, but also about contributors. If most of our contributors are putting most of their time in a DE project, then you have your answer.
On Tue, 2014-02-11 at 00:39 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On 02/10/2014 08:38 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
The idea of Fedora.next and the separate products is not to keep the same default product, plus add others, but rather transition to a new model. Sorry if that was unclear.
Are you saying that only these three working groups can and will be promoted leaving no room for other "official" released and promoted desktop products to (co)exist?
No. He's not saying that. And multiple people have already said explicitly that this is not what's happening. Why do you keep asking?
On 02/11/2014 01:35 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Tue, 2014-02-11 at 00:39 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On 02/10/2014 08:38 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
The idea of Fedora.next and the separate products is not to keep the same default product, plus add others, but rather transition to a new model. Sorry if that was unclear.
Are you saying that only these three working groups can and will be promoted leaving no room for other "official" released and promoted desktop products to (co)exist?
No. He's not saying that. And multiple people have already said explicitly that this is not what's happening. Why do you keep asking?
You are the one that it's claiming that's not happening to me he implied otherwise that's why I asked him.
If that is not the case as you strongly imply the answer to the workstation solution is simple.
An "Desktop WG" can be formed that consist of members from all the other desktop environment other then the one that gets "chosen" for the workstation working group or simply by those that have been passionate on this thread and that desktop working group can work on delivering the desktop experience for Fedora be branded as such and be released along with the rest of the WG's.
That effort should not take more then a ticket with Fesco and they assign a liason to that working group so Alexander,Dan simply put that to the test ;)
JBG
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 6:57 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" johannbg@gmail.com wrote:
On 02/11/2014 01:35 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Tue, 2014-02-11 at 00:39 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On 02/10/2014 08:38 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
The idea of Fedora.next and the separate products is not to keep the same default product, plus add others, but rather transition to a new model. Sorry if that was unclear.
Are you saying that only these three working groups can and will be promoted leaving no room for other "official" released and promoted desktop products to (co)exist?
No. He's not saying that. And multiple people have already said explicitly that this is not what's happening. Why do you keep asking?
You are the one that it's claiming that's not happening to me he implied otherwise that's why I asked him.
If that is not the case as you strongly imply the answer to the workstation solution is simple.
An "Desktop WG" can be formed that consist of members from all the other desktop environment other then the one that gets "chosen" for the workstation working group or simply by those that have been passionate on this thread and that desktop working group can work on delivering the desktop experience for Fedora be branded as such and be released along with the rest of the WG's.
That effort should not take more then a ticket with Fesco and they assign a liason to that working group so Alexander,Dan simply put that to the test ;)
Why waste my time? I know better. I will however, chip in my worthless opinion here because freedom of speech, right?
I know that Gnome 3 is going to get picked.
You literally have like 20 Gnome developers/red hat employees/fanboys on this list shouting about how Gnome should be the default DE.
And it will.
Power in numbers my friend.
Why give myself something extra to worry about? Extra meetings at really bad times that I'll never make because I'm in the pacific time zone?
We have put out a solid MATE product in Fedora since Fedora 16 and a spin since Fedora 19 with a big thanks to the KDE guy, Rex Dieter.
The fact that Red Hat themselves chose Gnome Classic for RHEL7 says a lot in itself. No offense, but it's a fact! Gnome 3 is quite obviously a serious WORK IN PROGRESS. Including but not limited to design choices made by developers that a lot of people disagree with. People actually trying to say "OK I give up let me try to get used to this gnome-shell thing".
Just like Gnome 2 took 14 Fedora releases+ to get to where it was so will Gnome 3 most likely as well. I don't care how many developers they have, it NEEDS WORK, which will require time.
I keep saying this over and over. Maybe I'm the idiot here:
Get rid of the "default". It's stupid. People running Fedora aren't. Stop treating them so.
Sure we get plenty of noobs coming in to #Fedora daily, but a lot of them are dealing with guess what, Gnome bugs.
So even with our QA process as it is, and according to Adam it will be even further burdened by Fedora.next.
Unless Red Hat decides to hire some people there will be even more bugs due to a QA team with even less resources than before and there will be even less bugs caught by QA who is in a constant mad dash to match a 6 month release cycle.
Why waste my time with this madness?
Gnome 3 is going to get picked, and that's that.
Is it "the most viable"? Any idiot knows that a product that isn't complete that it's NOT the best choice.
Something mature like KDE, XFCE, or MATE would be the "best" choice.
But why choose something mature? Why choose something in the actual best interest of Fedora?
Then again, in my opinion is there is no "best" choice!
Basically, my opinion is "choose your own adventure".
Look at popular distributions such as Linux Mint. You go to the front page and you see Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, and XFCE. They don't hide their various flavors of their distribution like we do. They ADVERTISE it. They ADVERTISE choice to their users. And guess what, people want choice. Which is not something that is really advertised by the Fedora website. Yeah, I've heard there's a redesign in the works, but I'm speaking about the current website which has been up there for a long time.
How can such a popular distribution survive without Gnome? You tell me.
Dan
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 19:21 -0800, Dan Mashal wrote:
But why choose something mature? Why choose something in the actual best interest of Fedora?
Why do you think anyone involved *doesn't* want what's in the best interests of Fedora?
Please read this note from the Debian init system dispute:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00390.html
because it applies pretty much verbatim to our little hoo-haa.
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 7:25 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 19:21 -0800, Dan Mashal wrote:
But why choose something mature? Why choose something in the actual best interest of Fedora?
Why do you think anyone involved *doesn't* want what's in the best interests of Fedora?
Please read this note from the Debian init system dispute:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00390.html
because it applies pretty much verbatim to our little hoo-haa.
I wasn't really going for the "conspiracy theory" there. I have met a lot of you at FUDcon and not only know better, but enjoy your company and our discussions on IRC.
To take the analogy about the large ship that Debian is and use it here:
My point was is that there is a so much momentum to continue on the path we're going that I find it nearly impossible to change course.
I know that everyone at Red Hat has their own opinion. I'm not wearing a tin foil hat.
I'm just merely trying to point out some obvious facts here.
I'm so confident that this is SO NOT HAPPENING that I'll say that if we decide to switch from Gnome 3 to MATE I'll buy everyone here a Ferrari.
However, once again I do think the "choose your own adventure" route is possible AND plausible. Other distros do it. Why can't Fedora?
Dan
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 19:35 -0800, Dan Mashal wrote:
I'm so confident that this is SO NOT HAPPENING that I'll say that if we decide to switch from Gnome 3 to MATE I'll buy everyone here a Ferrari.
I think you're operating under a bit of a misconception. Yes, it's clear GNOME 3 is going to be the chosen desktop for the workstation product. But no-one's said anything about waving some kind of magic wand and getting rid of all the others.
However, once again I do think the "choose your own adventure" route is possible AND plausible. Other distros do it. Why can't Fedora?
Again, no-one's saying we aren't. The other desktops will still be in the Fedora package collection. The current direction of the spins discussion seems to indicate that spins, or at least alternative desktop live images, are also likely to continue to exist. This list is the list where the Workstation WG is talking about its product. It is not deciding the future of the entire project.
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 8:35 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
I think you're operating under a bit of a misconception. Yes, it's clear GNOME 3 is going to be the chosen desktop for the workstation product. But no-one's said anything about waving some kind of magic wand and getting rid of all the others.
No, I'm not under a misconception. I never thought that we were getting rid of other DEs besides GNOME 3.
Again, no-one's saying we aren't. The other desktops will still be in the Fedora package collection. The current direction of the spins discussion seems to indicate that spins, or at least alternative desktop live images, are also likely to continue to exist. This list is the list where the Workstation WG is talking about its product. It is not deciding the future of the entire project.
Yes, I know. I was simply replying to other people's thoughts.
Again, I was making some very important points which don't seem to be really important to anyone in the WG. I was stating them just for the purpose of stating them.
I had some things I was going to say about the product itself (which quite honestly sounds like yet another GNOME fork), but I don't really feel like now is the time to do that.
That is all.
Dan
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 20:35:58 -0800, you wrote:
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 19:35 -0800, Dan Mashal wrote:
I'm so confident that this is SO NOT HAPPENING that I'll say that if we decide to switch from Gnome 3 to MATE I'll buy everyone here a Ferrari.
I think you're operating under a bit of a misconception. Yes, it's clear GNOME 3 is going to be the chosen desktop for the workstation product. But no-one's said anything about waving some kind of magic wand and getting rid of all the others.
So, if nothing is going to change, everything is going to continue on as before what was the point of starting and going through this whole process?
On Tue, 2014-02-11 at 09:47 -0500, Gerald Henriksen wrote:
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 20:35:58 -0800, you wrote:
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 19:35 -0800, Dan Mashal wrote:
I'm so confident that this is SO NOT HAPPENING that I'll say that if we decide to switch from Gnome 3 to MATE I'll buy everyone here a Ferrari.
I think you're operating under a bit of a misconception. Yes, it's clear GNOME 3 is going to be the chosen desktop for the workstation product. But no-one's said anything about waving some kind of magic wand and getting rid of all the others.
So, if nothing is going to change, everything is going to continue on as before what was the point of starting and going through this whole process?
I didn't say nothing was going to change. From now on I'm going to stop replying to your posts, as it's clearly just a waste of time to bother.
On Tue, 2014-02-11 at 09:48 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Tue, 2014-02-11 at 09:47 -0500, Gerald Henriksen wrote:
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 20:35:58 -0800, you wrote:
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 19:35 -0800, Dan Mashal wrote:
I'm so confident that this is SO NOT HAPPENING that I'll say that if we decide to switch from Gnome 3 to MATE I'll buy everyone here a Ferrari.
I think you're operating under a bit of a misconception. Yes, it's clear GNOME 3 is going to be the chosen desktop for the workstation product. But no-one's said anything about waving some kind of magic wand and getting rid of all the others.
So, if nothing is going to change, everything is going to continue on as before what was the point of starting and going through this whole process?
I didn't say nothing was going to change. From now on I'm going to stop replying to your posts, as it's clearly just a waste of time to bother.
Er, for the public record, apologies to Gerald - due to the flow of the conversation and a lack of morning coffee, I somehow had him confused with Alex GS.
Er, for the public record, apologies to Gerald - due to the flow of the conversation and a lack of morning coffee, I somehow had him confused with Alex GS.
For the record Christian Schaller's "Vision for the Fedora Workstation" really cleared up a lot of items for me as I actually sat down and read it in detail. Fedora Workstation is not about NOW it's about the FUTURE. This is about solving the very problems everyone including myself has NOW so things are better in the FUTURE. The default desktop is irrelevant because when the Workstation WG says default desktop they mean the base of technologies that will build their product. They don't mean GNOME 3 as it is NOW because whatever GNOME desktop they really want is the one that will be produced in the FUTURE specifically for the product. Hope that clarifies things.
On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 7:35 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.comwrote:
On Tue, 2014-02-11 at 09:48 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Tue, 2014-02-11 at 09:47 -0500, Gerald Henriksen wrote:
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 20:35:58 -0800, you wrote:
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 19:35 -0800, Dan Mashal wrote:
I'm so confident that this is SO NOT HAPPENING that I'll say that if we decide to switch from Gnome 3 to MATE I'll buy everyone here a Ferrari.
I think you're operating under a bit of a misconception. Yes, it's
clear
GNOME 3 is going to be the chosen desktop for the workstation product. But no-one's said anything about waving some kind of magic wand and getting rid of all the others.
So, if nothing is going to change, everything is going to continue on as before what was the point of starting and going through this whole process?
I didn't say nothing was going to change. From now on I'm going to stop replying to your posts, as it's clearly just a waste of time to bother.
Er, for the public record, apologies to Gerald - due to the flow of the conversation and a lack of morning coffee, I somehow had him confused with Alex GS. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 11:22:07PM -0500, Alex GS wrote:
technologies that will build their product. They don't mean GNOME 3 as it is NOW because whatever GNOME desktop they really want is the one that will be produced in the FUTURE specifically for the product. Hope that clarifies things.
Definitely. And if we can get more research data on which to base decisions, so much the better. It's just really hard to do what we'd really need to do to be data-driven, because we don't have the budget to do it right (i.e., the budget for this is $0.00, and we'd need... several times that) and doing it wrong (one study, or everyone bringing their favorite wikipedia articles, or looking solely at yum statistics) is arguably *worse* than going by feel, because at least feel is informed by a broader picture. Suggestions welcome here.
Dne 10.2.2014 12:09, Richard Hughes napsal(a):
On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters walters@verbum.org wrote:
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy. I think we're kidding ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts
I think you've made a typo here (hundreds???)
of the stack that GNOME uses. If I remember correctly, we have about two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on
and here as well...
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:29:25PM +0100, Lukáš Tinkl wrote:
Dne 10.2.2014 12:09, Richard Hughes napsal(a):
On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters walters@verbum.org wrote:
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy. I think we're kidding ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts
I think you've made a typo here (hundreds???)
This is not a typo. If you consider not just GNOME but the lower parts of the stack on which GNOME relies (as Colin wrote), it is actually hundreds. Of course, some of those lower parts of the stack are likely shared by many DEs, in varying amounts, but it's still accurate.
of the stack that GNOME uses. If I remember correctly, we have about two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on
and here as well...
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 21:26 +0100, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:29:25PM +0100, Lukáš Tinkl wrote:
Dne 10.2.2014 12:09, Richard Hughes napsal(a):
On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters walters@verbum.org wrote:
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy. I think we're kidding ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts
I think you've made a typo here (hundreds???)
This is not a typo. If you consider not just GNOME but the lower parts of the stack on which GNOME relies (as Colin wrote), it is actually hundreds. Of course, some of those lower parts of the stack are likely shared by many DEs, in varying amounts, but it's still accurate.
It's clearly *not* accurate, though, to use the 'desktop plus underlying stack' number for GNOME, but only the 'desktop' number for the other desktops. That's obviously an unviable comparison.
It's either say, what, about a dozen(?) vs. two or three if you just consider those working actually on the desktop, or "a dozen" plus "hundreds" vs. "two or three" plus "hundreds". You can't get away with comparing "a dozen" plus "hundreds" against "two or three", as Richard's mail did:
"the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts of the stack that GNOME uses. If I remember correctly, we have about two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on MATE."
Before everyone jumps to conclusions I think a big step is being skipped and overlooked. One of the biggest problems is that Linux desktop projects make preference oriented decisions like choosing blue because they find it pleasing over orange or whatever, purely qualitative. Or then it's the social factor, because we don't want to upset our friends by choosing another project or system. This has to stop, qualitative and political/social reasoning is not going to get a result that has any real meaning in the real world.
You need to consult statistics, conduct exhaustive user-surveys and make a data driven decision. I was shocked that despite the fact that this mailing-list is loaded to the brim with engineers I was the only one who ever quoted any precise statistics. Those statistics showed a desktop marketplace that's not aligned at all with the default desktop being discussed here.
Can you please present your case using actual statistics and analysis so we know it's a sound decision?
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 6:33 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.comwrote:
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 21:26 +0100, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:29:25PM +0100, Lukáš Tinkl wrote:
Dne 10.2.2014 12:09, Richard Hughes napsal(a):
On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters walters@verbum.org wrote:
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between
GNOME and
Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy. I think we're kidding ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts
I think you've made a typo here (hundreds???)
This is not a typo. If you consider not just GNOME but the lower parts of the stack on which GNOME relies (as Colin wrote), it is actually hundreds. Of course, some of those lower parts of the stack are likely shared by many DEs, in varying amounts, but it's still accurate.
It's clearly *not* accurate, though, to use the 'desktop plus underlying stack' number for GNOME, but only the 'desktop' number for the other desktops. That's obviously an unviable comparison.
It's either say, what, about a dozen(?) vs. two or three if you just consider those working actually on the desktop, or "a dozen" plus "hundreds" vs. "two or three" plus "hundreds". You can't get away with comparing "a dozen" plus "hundreds" against "two or three", as Richard's mail did:
"the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts of the stack that GNOME uses. If I remember correctly, we have about two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on MATE." -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net
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On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 2:17 AM, Alex GS alxgrtnstrngl@gmail.com wrote:
Can you please present your case using actual statistics and analysis so we know it's a sound decision?
I want to make an OS, not to read statistics all day. If you want to read
statistics and conduct research, feel free to do it on your own time, and don't waste mine with meaningless messages to a public list. We chose GNOME because it's the most viable solution to this problem, it's not about friends or about pleasing people with money, it's about what makes sense to this project in terms of technology, stability, quality and manpower.
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Elad Alfassa elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
We chose GNOME because it's the most viable solution to this problem
This is an extremely laughable OPINION. Not a fact.
Dan
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 03:33:23PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 21:26 +0100, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:29:25PM +0100, Lukáš Tinkl wrote:
Dne 10.2.2014 12:09, Richard Hughes napsal(a):
On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters walters@verbum.org wrote:
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy. I think we're kidding ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts
I think you've made a typo here (hundreds???)
This is not a typo. If you consider not just GNOME but the lower parts of the stack on which GNOME relies (as Colin wrote), it is actually hundreds. Of course, some of those lower parts of the stack are likely shared by many DEs, in varying amounts, but it's still accurate.
It's clearly *not* accurate, though, to use the 'desktop plus underlying stack' number for GNOME, but only the 'desktop' number for the other desktops. That's obviously an unviable comparison.
It's either say, what, about a dozen(?) vs. two or three if you just consider those working actually on the desktop, or "a dozen" plus "hundreds" vs. "two or three" plus "hundreds". You can't get away with comparing "a dozen" plus "hundreds" against "two or three", as Richard's mail did:
"the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts of the stack that GNOME uses. If I remember correctly, we have about two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on MATE."
Right, I think that comparison may not be totally fair. On top of those technologies, having dozens of people who work on GNOME is a compelling enough argument IMHO. I should have spoken less to the semantics, thanks.
On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 7:45 AM, Paul W. Frields stickster@gmail.com wrote:
Right, I think that comparison may not be totally fair. On top of those technologies, having dozens of people who work on GNOME is a compelling enough argument IMHO. I should have spoken less to the semantics, thanks.
I've never found this line of reasoning compelling. What is featured in Fedora isn't decided by this factor and to my knowledge this factor has never been given as a reason for anything else to be featured in Fedora. Fedora has a mission and that mission includes featuring the best of open source technology. If the shoe were on a different foot it would not be fair to the GNOME developers and users to exclude it from consideration based on this. They would rightly demand consideration based on the merits of what they have to offer.
I really would like the discussion to not be based on who pays for what but rather on why one technology provides the best solution for the workflows of the audience we are trying to reach with this product when compared to alternatives. That to me would form the basis of a compelling reason to choose one technology over another.
And given the traditional inclusion of GNOME as the technology that fills this role I think it is the burden of other technologies to make a case like this. Otherwise there isn't really any decision to be made.
John
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 12:09:59 +0100 Richard Hughes hughsient@gmail.com wrote:
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy. I think we're kidding ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts of the stack that GNOME uses. If I remember correctly, we have about two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on MATE. Fedora may be a community distro, but without the backing of Red Hat, it wouldn't be viable at all. When there's a Fedora release blocker that needs a few days of developer time, who do you think picks up the tab? I think that's probably an important thing to understand before damaging the relationship any further on votes that can only result in huge flame wars and a lot of wasted time.
Richard [*]
- Red Hat employee, but you probably knew that.
I might be the one you are mentioning in Relation to Xfce?
I'll note that I do work for Red Hat (and very happily so!), but my job is to keep Fedora Infrastructure running along smoothly, not Xfce maintaining. I've (co)maintained Xfce since about 2005, long before I worked for Red Hat, and do so as time permits. So, you can't really count me as 'full time working on Xfce'.
In any case, I agree with you here, as well as Christian's later post today on vision. I think gnome should be the default offering, but we should provide ways for savvy folks or those who aren't happy with Gnome to switch to other available desktops if they wish. (With the understanding that it's best effort, and Gnome will likely be more active). People who know what desktop they prefer can use that, and folks who have no idea what the various desktops mean can try our default offering.
In any case I think we should move on from this discussion and on to more interesting discussion of what f21's workstation will look like.
Looking forward to what you all will come up with. ;)
kevin
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 09:49:49AM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 12:09:59 +0100 Richard Hughes hughsient@gmail.com wrote:
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy. I think we're kidding ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts of the stack that GNOME uses. If I remember correctly, we have about two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on MATE. Fedora may be a community distro, but without the backing of Red Hat, it wouldn't be viable at all. When there's a Fedora release blocker that needs a few days of developer time, who do you think picks up the tab? I think that's probably an important thing to understand before damaging the relationship any further on votes that can only result in huge flame wars and a lot of wasted time.
Richard [*]
- Red Hat employee, but you probably knew that.
I might be the one you are mentioning in Relation to Xfce?
I'll note that I do work for Red Hat (and very happily so!), but my job is to keep Fedora Infrastructure running along smoothly, not Xfce maintaining. I've (co)maintained Xfce since about 2005, long before I worked for Red Hat, and do so as time permits. So, you can't really count me as 'full time working on Xfce'.
In any case, I agree with you here, as well as Christian's later post today on vision. I think gnome should be the default offering, but we should provide ways for savvy folks or those who aren't happy with Gnome to switch to other available desktops if they wish. (With the understanding that it's best effort, and Gnome will likely be more active). People who know what desktop they prefer can use that, and folks who have no idea what the various desktops mean can try our default offering.
Just to clarify, I think the idea of "default offering" is not something onto which we tack three additional products (Cloud, Server, Workstation). The idea of the Workstation, AIUI, is to provide a Fedora product that could conceivably take the place of the current default offering.
In any case I think we should move on from this discussion and on to more interesting discussion of what f21's workstation will look like.
Hear, hear!
Looking forward to what you all will come up with. ;)
Thanks for the input and for the interest. I am too, and plan to participate constructively here with the WG members.
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 09:40:53PM +0100, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 09:49:49AM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
In any case, I agree with you here, as well as Christian's later post today on vision. I think gnome should be the default offering, but we should provide ways for savvy folks or those who aren't happy with Gnome to switch to other available desktops if they wish. (With the understanding that it's best effort, and Gnome will likely be more active). People who know what desktop they prefer can use that, and folks who have no idea what the various desktops mean can try our default offering.
Just to clarify, I think the idea of "default offering" is not something onto which we tack three additional products (Cloud, Server, Workstation). The idea of the Workstation, AIUI, is to provide a Fedora product that could conceivably take the place of the current default offering.
I should clarify my clarification ;-) by saying this is not the *only* idea of the Workstation, just one aspect of what the product could achieve.
On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 8:49 AM, Kevin Fenzi kevin@scrye.com wrote:
In any case, I agree with you here, as well as Christian's later post today on vision. I think gnome should be the default offering but we should provide ways for savvy folks or those who aren't happy with Gnome to switch to other available desktops if they wish. (With the understanding that it's best effort, and Gnome will likely be more active). People who know what desktop they prefer can use that, and folks who have no idea what the various desktops mean can try our default offering.
I agree that we need to give people a choice to use something that is not Gnome.
Dan
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 12:09:59 +0100, you wrote:
On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters walters@verbum.org wrote:
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy.
I would turn that around and ask why isn't Red Hat evaulating what DE they are using (if they aren't)?
I have no illusions about the nature of the open source world. The products we use - Fedora, GNOME, the Linux kernel, Java, gcc, etc. - would not exist in the form that are today with the financial backing of the companies involved, and Red Hat is a rather significant part of that funding.
To cut off certain people, yes the volunteer time of all the free-time developers (whether their full time employment is also open source or not) is important, and would be missed if it went away, but the heavy lifiting is done by paid employees.
So given that Red Hat is putting money into this, I would expect Red Hat to want to periodically evaluate the value being created just like Fedora is attempting to.
I would also hope that Red Hat is evaluating other areas they expend significant resources, because at the end of the day the continued success of Linux relies on Red Hat being around, which means being smart about where they spend their limited resources.
On Feb 10, 2014 12:10 PM, "Richard Hughes" hughsient@gmail.com wrote:
On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters walters@verbum.org wrote:
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME
and
Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we want to use for workstation" is just crazy. I think we're kidding ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts of the stack that GNOME uses. If I remember correctly, we have about two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on MATE. Fedora may be a community distro, but without the backing of Red Hat, it wouldn't be viable at all. When there's a Fedora release blocker that needs a few days of developer time, who do you think picks up the tab? I think that's probably an important thing to understand before damaging the relationship any further on votes that can only result in huge flame wars and a lot of wasted time.
I think you are slightly overreacting here. I do not believe any relationship has been damaged. I also do not believe having an open discussion to start off a new effort is at all out of line. Clearly the data you and Colin have pointed to is critical to the discussion and I thank you for elaborating on it. I should have done so a bit more on my opening email.
However what you might view as a flame war or a waste of time is really an opportunity to both reassess and reaffirm what some might take for granted (including myself). It also allows us to gather information on other developments in upstreams we might not pay attention to. That information has other benefits outside of this specific discussion as well given that part of the PRD is clearly aimed at commonality amidst the various DEs.
So while the end result may be what most expect, the discussion is still necessary. As I said, this is not a popularity contest. I appreciate the participation from all sides thus far and I am looking forward to making an informed decision this week.
josh
(Forgive the formatting, I'm typing on s phone in the airport)
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 12:09 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
Hat, it wouldn't be viable at all. When there's a Fedora release blocker that needs a few days of developer time, who do you think picks up the tab?
Just for the accuracy of the record, we already block Fedora releases on KDE, and Red Hat by no means always 'picks up' that tab. We had a fairly nasty KDE blocker for F20 - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=983110 - whose tab was 'picked up' collaboratively by folks including a Red Hat developer (Rex), a non-RH Fedora contributor (Kevin), and a Canonical developer (Ryan Lortie).
----- Original Message -----
On Mon, 2014-02-10 at 12:09 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
Hat, it wouldn't be viable at all. When there's a Fedora release blocker that needs a few days of developer time, who do you think picks up the tab?
Just for the accuracy of the record, we already block Fedora releases on KDE, and Red Hat by no means always 'picks up' that tab. We had a fairly nasty KDE blocker for F20 - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=983110 - whose tab was 'picked up' collaboratively by folks including a Red Hat developer (Rex), a non-RH Fedora contributor (Kevin), and a Canonical developer (Ryan Lortie).
Just FYI, Rex is not Red Hat developer ;-). But there's pretty nice group of folks within Red Hat working on KDE, finally more in upstream. New NetworkManager applet, new login manager, screen configuration etc.
Jaroslav
-- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Tue, 2014-02-11 at 03:27 -0500, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
Just FYI, Rex is not Red Hat developer ;-). But there's pretty nice group
yeah, kevin pointed that out too. I don't know why I always get it wrong. :P
But we are not a company (like Google or Apple), we are a community project. So the data we want to make a decision like this shouldn't be just from users, but also about contributors. If most of our contributors are putting most of their time in a DE project, then you have your answer.
Google makes a good point, you guys should be making a decision based on data and not opinions. This isn't an art experiment or creative writing project. This is an engineering project that makes software that becomes part of an engineering product RHEL. You owe it to RHEL and it's subscribers who eventually have to live with your decisions that those decisions were the BEST ones you could possibly make based on the data. You should ask your Red Hat colleagues if they can borrow a few Red Hat analysts for a week or so to help them gather research, analysis and make a more informed decision to help guide the product development process. I'm sure these Red Hat analysts have friends at the IDC who can provide much of the research materials.
Please don't repeat the same mediocre product management found in every Linux distribution. I'm sick of seeing Linux projects make the same obvious mistakes over and over again. These mistakes are preventable through good research and analysis.
On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 3:59 AM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.comwrote:
On Tue, 2014-02-11 at 03:27 -0500, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
Just FYI, Rex is not Red Hat developer ;-). But there's pretty nice group
yeah, kevin pointed that out too. I don't know why I always get it wrong. :P -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net
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On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 09:02:08 +0000, you wrote:
On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 8:54 AM, Josh Boyer jwboyer@fedoraproject.org wrote:
So, we really kind of need to settle on something and get started.
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange - it's a bit like having a friend who suddenly meets someone else they find interesting, and maybe you get a polite wave when you're passing.
You'd be left wondering what you did wrong...
The somewhat simple answer to that is the rather decisive GNOME Shell.
It was GNOME Shell that fractured the GNOME user community into GNOME / Cinnamon / Mate (and to a lesser extent other desktops that use GTK like Xfce).
If GNOME 3 had been everything that it is but without GNOME Shell then it is likely none of this would be occurring.
On Feb 10, 2014 10:07 AM, "Colin Walters" walters@verbum.org wrote:
On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 8:54 AM, Josh Boyer jwboyer@fedoraproject.org
wrote:
So, we really kind of need to settle on something and get started.
I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and
Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange - it's a bit like having a friend who suddenly meets someone else they find interesting, and maybe you get a polite wave when you're passing.
You'd be left wondering what you did wrong...
I think (hope?) I addressed this part in my reply to Richard.
Further, I really dislike the mindset where it's all about switching
between pre-formed but completely different things. There is a whole spectrum of options in between, such as small forking.
I think this is something where technology drives culture - packages
*punish* forking - you have to tediously rename all of the upstream source code so that the files don't stomp on each other, just for the completely obscure use case of having multiple desktops "installed" at the same time.
Which then in turn makes it *much, much harder* to merge back. Instead,
packages reward writing completely new implementations. Of course, I come at this from the OSTree perspective, which makes it pretty easy to have scalable branches that you can switch between, instead of requiring co-installation.
And finally, the relative omission of the fact that Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 7 has *already forked* in this discussion is kind of odd, to say the least. Personally I think classic mode is a visible symbol of the malfunctioning feedback mechanism. Or really, not even feedback - it should be about cooperation, with actual *code* flowing both ways.
I agree that the small forking possibility is extremely important here. This is not a "pick an upstream and ship it" effort. We are looking for a basis to start from. The ability to modify to best meet our end goals is key and that will include adaptations and small diversions in whatever upstream is used.
Your comments around packaging and ostree are certainly valid as well, but I would prefer to tackle one problem at a time :).
josh
desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org