Am 27.11.2013 18:47, schrieb Richard Brown:

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1) Add focus to increase alignment among contributors.

Why? for what purpose and to what end? Does that alignment include finding ways to make openSUSE and SLE more aligned such as introduced by Ralf Flaxa at oSC 14? I think it was still 2013 :)

Ralf's wish to have SLE and openSUSE closer together is a wish many others share. But if you go deeper, you'll soon notice that what some wish is exactly the opposite for others. So there is no easy solution. But alignment is just a buzzword IMO for working together. And that's a goal that can indeed stand for itself. Working together on a common goal is more inspiring than working alone.

How do we address the obvious concern that adding 'focus' might disenfranchise contributors who do not agree with the chosen direction for that focus?

Well, I dislike the word 'focus' as having focus means you don't see much else. But if we want to work on something, we have to have a common goal - and that's where a "focus" comes in. And people not wanting to work towards that common goal either create a problem or they don't. If they do create a problem, we should have an agreed base on which we push back. In our current strategy it's pretty much impossible to push back on people as our strategy is very broad and *I* think it has been good for us growing. But I'd be fine with having more disagreement on things if they are important.

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2) Are there any other aspects relevant in this discussion? Can you summarize them?

The openSUSE Team at SUSE are making a lot of proposals. Assuming broad community acceptance of these ideas, how much of this work are you expecting your team to shoulder, and how much of the burden will the 'wider community' be expected to pick up?

Everything of it is supposed to happen from within the community and SUSE (and its openSUSE Team) will help. No matter what's being said, we're just human beings. We have some preferences about the order of things ourselves, but in the end all we're trying is starting a discussion (and take it - we have 3 years to go till 2016 :) Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 11/28/2013 03:15 AM, Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:

Hi,

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- The openSUSE user base needs to grow. We propose to be even more open to new niches.

Why? More users is never a bad thing, but why do we *need* to grow the users? We could be a distribution by our contributors, for our contributors. What's the case that makes it clear we *need* to grow the number of users?

I would like openSUSE to stay relevant. For example relevant to stay (or get) supported from third party (yes, even closed source) software vendors.

This is extremely difficult.SUSE has a whole team dedicated to get support for SLES from ISVs. Every time an ISVs states supprt for a distribution it costs the ISV a large chunk of money. I am not certain that we can pedal fast and hard enough to make it worth the while of an ISV to state support for openSUSE. There is not necessarily a direct correlation to relevance.

Relevant enough so people outside of the openSUSE community are seeing openSUSE as a relevant target to "integrate" with. If we just want to be "a distribution by our contributors, for our contributors" how many users will we have in a few years? More users will also increase the number of contributors.

I also believe that there is a correlation between users and contributors, thus I believe that growing the user base willhelp us grow the contributor base. However, I am not certain we need to make large directional shifts in order to grow our user base. Our contributor base has been growing on a reasonably steady pace, as indicated in the "statistics thread". Thus we appear to be doing something right. I'd rather grow slow and steady than chase the latest fads just to get a boost or jump in contributors in the short term but that will ultimately leave when the next fad comes around.

<snip>

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* Technical governance model adapted to our new development processes: very few but clearer rules. Mentoring ecosystem.

This is certainly an area I'm interested in seeing what the rest of our community feels. Our current Governance body (The Board) is strictly forbidden from making Technical decisions.

I would really prefer someone to be able to make technical decisions if needed. The status quo seems to be that coolo is the one because someone needs to keep Factory working. So we will always need someone to decide and even when I basically trust coolo I think this is not the right approach.

Well, coolo is not the only one making the decisions. We do have a process of getting stuff into factory. This is mostly being followed I think. The process includes publicly proclaiming the intentions of getting a package into factory. When this happens everyone has the opportunity to pipe up and state their case why a given package should or should not be in factory. Not responding as is the case in most cases is also a decision and indicates that people are OK with the submission. For the most part I think we've had very little controversy in this area, which is great and thus things get more or less rubber stamped. There is also an escalation process that eventually leads to the board if there is strong controversy over a given submission to factory. But as I said, as far as I can remember we have not needed to go that route and I personally am very happy about that.

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I understand the philosophy for Technical Governance to date has largely been 'those who do, decide'. If changes are made in this area, I'd like to think they can keep that spirit, the idea anyone can get involved and that changes are made on their technical merits, not political ones (eg. does the submitter sit on the right steering group? who is their employer?)

Yes, no politics please. Just technical decisions to the best of the project.

Is this a vote/argument for a technical steering committee? As mentioned above, I think the way things work right now we make technical decisions, maybe they are not explicit, but they do get made. With a technical steering committee the chances of politics entering the mechanism are higher, I think.

I also don't think that this task should be done by the board but by a different group of people. The 'those who do, decide' is basically something I support to an extend. But we had examples in the past that people who decided only "did it" halfway and put the burden onto the rest of of the community to fix their mess

Yes, that has happened and is definitely not nice behavior to the rest of the community. However I am not certain that a different decision making process would help here, it maybe that a few tweaks to the development model maybe better suited to address these cases. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 30 November 2013 23:46, Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:

I'm still concerned that we have no "legitimized" board for escalated technical decisions. For non-critical things the community approach probably is enough but there might be situations where a formal transparent traceable process leading to a decision is needed. Which instance in the community is supposed to decide in such situations today? The board is explicitely (as I understood) not meant to do that.

The current logic (as I understand it) goes something like this..and I realise this is simplified, but hopefully illustrative. 1) Contributor A wants to change something technical to the distribution 2) Contributor A suggests it on -factory ML and/or does the changes and submits them to the appropriate devel repo and/or Factory 3a) If no one dislikes Contributor A's changes, and they conform to the few policies/procedures we have changes get accepted, SUCCESS - END 3b) If other Contributors (lets just assume 1 for the sake of this example, Contributor B) dislike/disapprove of the changes, or has an alternative way of tackling the same issue, Contributors A and B are expected to talk it out, and either realise that one of them are wrong and accept the others suggestion on it's technical merits, or work together to find a satisfactory compromise. Then those changes end up accepted, SUCCESS - END 4) If Contributors A and B can't resolve their differences, it could be argued that the 'dispute' at this point is no longer 'technical' but has become personal - in which case the case (the disagreement between A and B) could be escalated to the current Board for mediation - we'd step in to calm waters, build bridges, and try and get the two contributors to find a solution that satisfies them both - The Board would be be motivated to resolve the 'personal disagreement', still leaving the 'technical' side of things to hopefully be resolved by the contributors in question, as they are likely to know far more about the technical topic at hand than the members of the Board Now, I do realise the picture I paint above is utopian, but I can't think of any cases in the last year where the Board were called in for a scenario like I describe in 4, which leads me to think steps 1-3 are probably 'mostly' working. That's not to say I don't see how a 'technical' escalation point might be a good idea, but that is the logic of our current setup, and I personally think it has its benefits. It places very few barriers infront of our contributors to hold them back from making changes, and encourages team work and collaboration when technical 'clashes' occur. It also places a responsibility on our contributors to find the best technical solution between themselves. There is a bias in this model towards 'change', which I think is a good thing for a 'developing' distribution like current openSUSE and proposed future Factory, but that bias does have the downside of upsetting those (both technical and non-technical) who advocate 'don't change X' and can't offer an alternative/better way of changing X. Of course, if we end up having improving/stabilising Factory cover the 'we want change' crowd and change our openSUSE release schedule to cover the 'change less often' crowd.. then do we really need some group to escalate 'technical' issues too? I'm not so sure.. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 11/30/2013 05:46 PM, Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:

Am 30.11.2013 22:22, schrieb Robert Schweikert:

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I would like openSUSE to stay relevant. For example relevant to stay (or get) supported from third party (yes, even closed source) software vendors.

This is extremely difficult.SUSE has a whole team dedicated to get support for SLES from ISVs. Every time an ISVs states supprt for a distribution it costs the ISV a large chunk of money. I am not certain that we can pedal fast and hard enough to make it worth the while of an ISV to state support for openSUSE. There is not necessarily a direct correlation to relevance.

hmm, some examples I have in mind: SpiderOak Spotify Crossover Office

That's not the sort of ISV you are used to probably but none of them has packages for openSUSE but they have for Fedora and Ubuntu at least. And there are probably many more similar to those. And yes I'm pretty sure that the size of the user base is relevant to get their attention.

Hmmm, possibly the user base is important to get their attention. I should say the perception of the size of the user base may be important. According to the stats we have a larger user base than Fedora. Thus I think it is probably more of a mindshare thing and that's where your expressed desire of "remaining. being more relevant as a distribution" comes in. Many people I have worked with in the ISV world pick Fedora, CentOS, or Ubuntu as the starting point for new projects because they are the "defaults", there's no research into user base or "market share". Those distros are "defaults" because of mindshare. The second thing I have seen and that may actually be the dominant case is that the supported distro is picked because there is one enthusiast for a particular distribution working at the company. Thus I think the question goes back to: - How do we create more openSUSE enthusiasts? (this is equivalent to increasing the user base, but we know this is not sufficient onto its own.) - How do we increase the openSUSE mindshare?

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I would really prefer someone to be able to make technical decisions if needed. The status quo seems to be that coolo is the one because someone needs to keep Factory working. So we will always need someone to decide and even when I basically trust coolo I think this is not the right approach.

Well, coolo is not the only one making the decisions. We do have a process of getting stuff into factory. This is mostly being followed I think. The process includes publicly proclaiming the intentions of getting a package into factory. When this happens everyone has the opportunity to pipe up and state their case why a given package should or should not be in factory. Not responding as is the case in most cases is also a decision and indicates that people are OK with the submission.

The process is only for new additions to Factory. I'm thinking more about changes done to components already in openSUSE. I'm not aware there is a process (and I couldn't imagine a process for it anyway).

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I understand the philosophy for Technical Governance to date has largely been 'those who do, decide'. If changes are made in this area, I'd like to think they can keep that spirit, the idea anyone can get involved and that changes are made on their technical merits, not political ones (eg. does the submitter sit on the right steering group? who is their employer?)

Yes, no politics please. Just technical decisions to the best of the project.

Is this a vote/argument for a technical steering committee?

Yes. In some situations in the past I would have liked a group of persons to take technical decisions (based on different input) if there are conflicts in the community about certain things.

This I can follow, a team, that advertizes and makes ultimate decisions about things like the systemd transition. I guess Wayland will be the next decision like that. As such this team is not a "steering committee" committee per se, we'd have to come up with some different name. I do see the usefulness having heard many times over that the systemd transition was "properly advertized". I think this is worth a separate discussion at some other time as we have big fish to fry right now and should possibly not explore all avenues that get opened up by the bigger discussion. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Saturday 30 November 2013 23:46:37 Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:

Am 30.11.2013 22:22, schrieb Robert Schweikert:

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I would like openSUSE to stay relevant. For example relevant to stay (or get) supported from third party (yes, even closed source) software vendors.

This is extremely difficult.SUSE has a whole team dedicated to get support for SLES from ISVs. Every time an ISVs states supprt for a distribution it costs the ISV a large chunk of money. I am not certain that we can pedal fast and hard enough to make it worth the while of an ISV to state support for openSUSE. There is not necessarily a direct correlation to relevance.

hmm, some examples I have in mind: SpiderOak Spotify Crossover Office

That's not the sort of ISV you are used to probably but none of them has packages for openSUSE but they have for Fedora and Ubuntu at least. And there are probably many more similar to those. And yes I'm pretty sure that the size of the user base is relevant to get their attention.

As we're about 2-3 times larger than Fedora, the size of the userbase seems not to be the reason - or we advertise our user base not very well. And I think it is that: we are not good at marketing and it has gotten much worse over the last year.

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I would really prefer someone to be able to make technical decisions if needed. The status quo seems to be that coolo is the one because someone needs to keep Factory working. So we will always need someone to decide and even when I basically trust coolo I think this is not the right approach.

Well, coolo is not the only one making the decisions. We do have a process of getting stuff into factory. This is mostly being followed I think. The process includes publicly proclaiming the intentions of getting a package into factory. When this happens everyone has the opportunity to pipe up and state their case why a given package should or should not be in factory. Not responding as is the case in most cases is also a decision and indicates that people are OK with the submission.

The process is only for new additions to Factory. I'm thinking more about changes done to components already in openSUSE. I'm not aware there is a process (and I couldn't imagine a process for it anyway).

How about we adopt the type of process being used by Debian, Python, Gentoo and others. Example: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0001/ It is a sensible way of working: proposals have to be put in a document with a defined structure (so you don't forget anything) and then checked before put up for discussion. We don't need committees or dictators, it all still goes via opensuse-factory or opensuse-project, it's just that the discussion gets started with a 'proper' and clear proposal and there's a clear decision path.

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I understand the philosophy for Technical Governance to date has largely been 'those who do, decide'. If changes are made in this area, I'd like to think they can keep that spirit, the idea anyone can get involved and that changes are made on their technical merits, not political ones (eg. does the submitter sit on the right steering group? who is their employer?)

Yes, no politics please. Just technical decisions to the best of the project.

Is this a vote/argument for a technical steering committee?

Yes. In some situations in the past I would have liked a group of persons to take technical decisions (based on different input) if there are conflicts in the community about certain things.

See above. I don't think we need it. Right now, Coolo comes to a decision after seeking consensus. We can formalize that and split coolo into a release team or such :D

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As mentioned above, I think the way things work right now we make technical decisions, maybe they are not explicit, but they do get made.

Yes, they get made. Often enough not transparent enough in my opinion and not explicit enough but just by ignoring things and let contributors do whatever they like. Yes, that is a decision but not the sort of decisions I like to see. And please don't ask for examples. There are probably not many but it's my feeling and that is enough in the end.

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I also don't think that this task should be done by the board but by a different group of people. The 'those who do, decide' is basically something I support to an extend. But we had examples in the past that people who decided only "did it" halfway and put the burden onto the rest of of the community to fix their mess

Yes, that has happened and is definitely not nice behavior to the rest of the community. However I am not certain that a different decision making process would help here, it maybe that a few tweaks to the development model maybe better suited to address these cases.

I'm still concerned that we have no "legitimized" board for escalated technical decisions. For non-critical things the community approach probably is enough but there might be situations where a formal transparent traceable process leading to a decision is needed. Which instance in the community is supposed to decide in such situations today? The board is explicitely (as I understood) not meant to do that.

I think that would all be solved by using the process these other communities use. Want me to whip up a more proper proposal? ;-) /J

Wolfgang

On Monday 02 December 2013 09:39:09 jdd wrote:

Le 02/12/2013 09:38, Jos Poortvliet a écrit :

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I think that would all be solved by using the process these other communities use. Want me to whip up a more proper proposal? ;-)

isn't that a kind of RFC?

Yeap. It could also be helpful for the discussion we have now - if we set this up first then once the ideas here turn into proper proposals we can get them through this process...

it's the way to follow

good jdd

Hey there, Am 02.12.2013 15:18, schrieb Robert Schweikert:

If you have a process then the next problem you'll have is to decide when to follow the process and when not. A change like systemd yes, what about the change from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3? Is it worth writing a proposal when there is no choice? This very quickly goes down a rabbit hole. Anyway, It is probably worth a separate discussion at a later time.

Well, a process isn't something which stays the same forever. It can get reviewd , changed or even drop if you found out that it is not working. But, a process should always be clean and clear, so the GNOME change is really nor problem, if the upstream goes that way we just can follow, a proposal only makes sense if you got a choice, thats true, but anyway when it is a defined process you shoudl write a statement, at least it should say "i had no choice" or "we had to go this direction or make on our own" :-) it saves a lot of discussion Cheers -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 02/12/2013 16:24, Tomáš Chvátal a écrit :

thing formalizing current process will be great. Currently Coolo overwatch factory ML and decides what goes in and then points to the announcement mail is quite suboptimal compared to the nice proposal you can point to and update as needed.

don't forget RFC's full name "Request For Comments" is misleading, good RFC are nearly never changed, but they remain as solid stone for the future and the future discussions. some (probably mandatory) changes should not be constantly challenged in mailing lists... jdd NB: speaking of Coolo, if I'm not wrong, I remember having him more than once asked for help, and not so many people stepped on. Being the right man on the right place may sometime be a problem :-)) -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 02.12.2013 13:10, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

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hmm, some examples I have in mind: SpiderOak Spotify Crossover Office

That's not the sort of ISV you are used to probably but none of them has packages for openSUSE but they have for Fedora and Ubuntu at least. And there are probably many more similar to those. And yes I'm pretty sure that the size of the user base is relevant to get their attention.

I think almost nobody can question that we are the number 3 or 4 option for companies like the ones above.....and many other Free Software companies. Ubuntu, Red Hat ecosystem and Debian are too frequently in front of us when choosing a distro to based you business upon.

Why would you "base your business" upon a distribution? There is no such thing, except in rare cases. Distributions are "just there", a vehicle. Apart from that, customer simply expect that the "Free Software company" supports the distro they want anyway. Nobody talks about differences or "distro A is better than B" any more. The big plus from the past that distros had, which was the fact that the distros brought the software to many people on CD, melt away in the internet sun. Moreover, for quick young companies it has disadvantages if the product is shipped on a distro because user get old versions soon and there is hardly a way to push version updates through distros. From my experience as somebody who has to build bin packages of a product of a "small opensource company" I can tell: Customers mainly ask for Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian. If we as company get in touch with openSUSE it is because we pushed it during the POC phase. I can not remember that somebody asked for openSUSE on the server. People stay away because they don't know or because there is no LTS (in their opinion). We should not dream the "all the FOSS companies will help us" dream. IMHO. regards, Klaas -- ...und freier Mut gebiert die Tat! Erich Mühsam. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Robert Schweikert - 20:08 2.12.13 wrote:

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We will only get more people "clamoring" for openSUSE by gaining mind share. This occurs through advocacy and marketing. Fiddling with the release cycle or pushing the quality to ever new heights will not do the trick.

I would agree with companies part but disagree with your conclusion. We have actually really good marketing. And looks like getting contributors is not about marketing. At least not alone. Let's take a look at Gentoo. If you try to evaluate their marketing, they look dead on the outside. But inside distro is better than ever and have plenty of contributors. Maybe I would agree that shifting our marketing focus might help, but for that we would need to do more changes inside first... -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 03.12.2013 13:08, Will Stephenson wrote:

On Tuesday 03 Dec 2013 07:00:29 Michal Hrusecky wrote:

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I would agree with companies part but disagree with your conclusion. We have actually really good marketing.

Are you sure about that?

Are you sure you wanted to ask a meta question? Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 1:43 PM, Michal Hrusecky wrote:

Will Stephenson - 13:08 3.12.13 wrote:

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On Tuesday 03 Dec 2013 07:00:29 Michal Hrusecky wrote:

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I would agree with companies part but disagree with your conclusion. We have actually really good marketing.

Are you sure about that?

Well, nobody calls us dead and people know that we still exist. Which is more that I can tell about Gentoo :-)

How well we do depends on what you look at. We do great for the release: our press kit is in time and we write articles for news.o.o. Or at least, I do, and there sometimes is a little help (andi has recently helped out, thanks for that). It of course USED to be a team effort. Social-media wise, we're doing great too, thanks to the efforts of Ilias, Terrorpup, Stathis, Gertjan Letting, Victorhck and others. I think I shared a graph before, but if I didn't - here's one: http://susepaste.org/63730501 - statts are maintained by Ilias, yay ;-) In other areas - I looked up a few numbers. Draw your own conclusions. The openSUSE Ambassador program was one of the main activities of AJ and myself (together with general marketing, of course) until the 1st half of 2012, when we both got new responsibilities. Mails on the ambassador ML from Jan-Nov: 2011: 1010 2012: 338 2013: 151 This communication is of course about planning events, we were still building up our efforts in 2011 and the first months of 2012 (planning happens in advance...) So, the events: 2011: 71 2012: 78 2013: 27 * 20 on the list are actually an event in Mexico

From http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Ambassadors_events (not complete, never is, never was - but it gives a good idea).

Then there is writing articles for various websites and magazines, preparing marketing materials, promoting our events etc. which we coordinate on the marketing ML. Mails on the marketing ML from Jan-Nov 2011: 2499 2012: 730 2013: 354 I didn't look up the nr of articles written by the marketing team about openSUSE in various places, but in 2013 there were none that I am aware off. Most of the marketing materials we have are from the 12.1 and 12.2 releases. And anybody remembers https://twitter.com/omgsuse ??? Cheers, Jos

-- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 2:08 AM, Robert Schweikert wrote:

On 12/02/2013 05:12 PM, Klaas Freitag wrote:

...

On 02.12.2013 13:10, agustin benito bethencourt wrote: From my experience as somebody who has to build bin packages of a product of a "small opensource company" I can tell: Customers mainly ask for Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian. If we as company get in touch with openSUSE it is because we pushed it during the POC phase. I can not remember that somebody asked for openSUSE on the server. People stay away because they don't know or because there is no LTS (in their opinion).

We should not dream the "all the FOSS companies will help us" dream. IMHO.

I agree.

We will only get more people "clamoring" for openSUSE by gaining mind share. This occurs through advocacy and marketing. Fiddling with the release cycle or pushing the quality to ever new heights will not do the trick.

I've been following this discussion, but with little to add untiul tonight when I stumbled across this: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20131202#feature Quoting the author: --------------- For reasons I've never quite understood the openSUSE distribution has always held an unusual place in my mind. Were someone to ask me about the most popular and user-friendly distributions I'd readily talk about Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, Mageia and Debian. Chances are the openSUSE distribution would completely slip my mind. However, if someone were to specifically ask me for my opinion of openSUSE I would happily and heartily recommend the distribution. I don't know why openSUSE, as much as I respect it, doesn't stand out more in my thoughts. Perhaps the openSUSE project just doesn't attract as much news coverage as other open source projects. ------------- Maybe there's something to be learned from the statement? C. -- openSUSE 12.3 x86_64, KDE 4.11 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 28.11.2013 11:58, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

Our plan is to publish one more proposal today and probably Monday. But we can delay the one on Monday a few days if people feel it is too much. We also need time to answer properly. Hi Agustin,

Your mail is 7 pages of printout. Do you seriously expect people that do openSUSE in their free time to read that? Little less Castro, little more JFK... Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Thursday 28 November 2013 13.41:57 agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

Hi,

On Thursday 28 November 2013 12:35:02 Stephan Kulow wrote:

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On 28.11.2013 11:58, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

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Our plan is to publish one more proposal today and probably Monday. But we can delay the one on Monday a few days if people feel it is too much. We also need time to answer properly.

Hi Agustin,

Your mail is 7 pages of printout. Do you seriously expect people that do openSUSE in their free time to read that? Little less Castro, little more JFK...

Describe complex things in a few words is an art that takes quiet some time ;-) I am glad to see that you have developed it and that you are part of the Team.

Saludos

Whereas those discussion will drive us, I particularly appreciate those exchange. Men you were never so close from us. Fresh, honest, and direct, keep that going ;-) Thanks again for that. -- Bruno Friedmann openSUSE Member GPG KEY : D5C9B751C4653227 irc: tigerfoot -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 11/28/2013 05:58 AM, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

Hi Richard,

it is a pleasure to face these discussions when the tone is like yours. Thank you. Please read below.

On Wednesday 27 November 2013 18:47:11 Richard Brown wrote:

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Thanks for your email Agustin, below are my thoughts, responses, and further questions:

On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 17:40 +0100, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

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What do we want to achieve? Goals =================================

1) Add focus to increase alignment among contributors.

Why? for what purpose and to what end? Does that alignment include finding ways to make openSUSE and SLE more aligned such as introduced by Ralf Flaxa at oSC 14?

How do we address the obvious concern that adding 'focus' might disenfranchise contributors who do not agree with the chosen direction for that focus?

There are many examples that reflects what I refer to when talking about alignment. One could be the oSC'13. The other one the relation between KDE and GNOME within factory.

Alignment can mean many things. The GNOME team is aligned to work on GNOME packages, the KDE team is aligned to work on KDE, and the list goes on. For oSC13 we had a temporary team aligned to pull the event together with a few very dedicated people that put their heart and soul into the event to pull everything together. The way you are speaking of alignment implies a greater scope, potentially project wide, and thus people are weary. As Kostas pointed out in the other thread, people volunteer their time. This implies that they get to decide how to spend their time and how to contribute. This makes an overall alignment unlikely. The continued harping on focus is a bit of a nuisance. Maybe the absence of an overall grand plan causes us to try to be too many things to all people and be not "focused" on any given group. However, it has also served us well. We have lots of choices, Tumbleweed, Evergreen, 5 DEs, mysql, mariadb,..... and that also makes it fun to participate and contribute to openSUSE. And I am certain this flexibility has helped us gaining new contributors and users. No I have no statistics to bakc that up ;) . I am with Richard, pointing out a specific target area and tailoring the distribution after that has the potential to disenfranchise those that may not want to focus in that area and I see no reason why we would want to kick those contributors to the curb. If we end up with a grand plan and a "focus" area we have even less to differentiate ourselves from Ubuntu or Fedora, where in one case you have a dictatorship by Mark and in another you have to appease a committee. I believe that our model very closely resembles the spirit of the open source community, come contribute scratch your own itch and be recognized for it.

Yes, as Ralf, pointed in the keynote, we are also looking for ways to contribute more in the project and, at the same time, make that contribution valuable for us. SUSE is not a big corporate, but a healthy medium size company.

But focus also refers to our target.

Many of us contribute for ourselves and for someone else (use cases said Wolfgang ). We would like to work on getting a common picture, if possible, of who are those "someone else". Any step in that direction would help the project in my opinion.

Developing that picture is a completely separate undertaking than making proposals about structures, process, procedures, changing the development model etc. Intermingling these just causes confusion and discussions with lack of clarity.

...

<snip>

...

...

* Clarify roles and responsibilities. Redesign processes so we increase the

community participation in key areas. Teams instead of champions.

Sounds good, but how about we aim for increasing community participation in *all* areas?

I think we need focus to become more successful. Pick up a few, put energy on them, be successful and then go for other ones.

"More successful", what does this mean? Do we have shareholders/stakeholders to report to on how we become more successful? What is the motivation here? Who in the community is complaining that we are not successful enough and we need to be more successful? Are our users complaining that we are not successful enough? Who is driving the "we need to be more successful" train?

...

...

* More stability and QA. Testing before submitting. Factory should be usable.

* Rolling distribution based on release early/release often principle.

This proposal will be more in depth described tomorrow on Factory mailing list where we will expand the bullet points mentioned here.

Sounds good, I'm looking forward to it

...

Overhauled openSUSE Release ===========================

All sounds very ambitious. I'm interested in hearing more

...

Open Governance Model =====================

While I think I get where you're coming from and don't disagree with some of the specifics you're proposing (The evolution of SUSE from Owner to eventual Patron), I strongly believe that the Governance of the openSUSE Project is an issue for the openSUSE Board and our openSUSE Membership.

Nobody has questioned that. We are good citizens. And if there are areas in which we can improve, please point them. We will analyze what happen.

...

I don't want the changes you've proposed to be seen as SUSE imposing its will on the Project.

I hope your proposals will be seen by our members as food for thought, a starting point for discussion, which might possibly lead to changes down the road from here.

I want to stop a little in this point because I have also read a couple other comments pointing some fears about SUSE not acting like a good citizen in openSUSE in the future.

Neils Brauckman, President and General Manager at SUSE[1], in his opening keynote at SUSECon'13[2], Ralf Flaxa, VicePresident of Engineering at SUSE[1], in his keynote at oSC'13[3] or Michael Miller, Vice President of Global Alliances & Marketing[1], in previous events, has provided their view about openSUSE from SUSE perspective. From their words, there are no reasons to fear anything. I thnk it is exactly the other way around.

Since we are an independent business unit from the Attachment Group, can you point at any relevant action that might justify those fears?

Well this list is long and I'd rather not get into the specifics as this will probably turn ugly, which I will try to avoid. What I am going to point out is that based on the approaches taken over the past year or so the perception of an ever growing "us and them" rift has developed in the community. This is evidenced by responses from Kostas in the "statistics thread", responses from Dominique and others in the discussion we had about the development process a while back and if we dig through the mailing list many more examples can probably be found. The fears originate with the observed behavior patterns of what is perceived to be separating groups of people as being "different or special". Those seeds have been sown and it will take more than announcements by SUSE leadership to alleviate the concerns that have been stirred by the observed behavior. Change has to occur where the rubber meets the road, not by proclamation of commitment. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Am 27.11.2013 19:36, schrieb Per Jessen:

...

4) How do you think we should proceed in order to go from these ideas to real actions?

Start by identifying which areas need attention. For instance, for a professional Linux user or admin, which problems do we create today? In which areas do we lack attention to better suit a professional environment? Basically take a good look at the perceived/intended end user, and see where we clash or could have a better fit.

Hi Per, I wonder what you'll do as someone with the business needs you have if the end of this gap analysis will be that we don't support professional environments well enough. Would you contribute what remains or do you expect "the community" to do so? Without any means to attack anyone, but the later is what I often see - people complain about the lack of support from "the community" when they're part of it themselves. Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 28.11.2013 08:35, Per Jessen wrote:

...

I wonder what you'll do as someone with the business needs you have if the end of this gap analysis will be that we don't support professional environments well enough.

Would you contribute what remains or do you expect "the community" to do so? Without any means to attack anyone, but the later is what I often see - people complain about the lack of support from "the community" when they're part of it themselves.

Hi Stephan,

if the community decides to move the distro in this direction, yes, I would expect the community to focus on bridging the identified gap. To what extent I or some of my colleagues could/would contribute, would depend on the tasks at hand and how well our skills suit them.

But this means we can't make this a christmas gift list. We have to consider where our skills are and then move. It won't gain us anything to decide we want to go for "enterprise class ship building with sliding doors" if none of us has an idea how to do that. And this basically means we can only go where we have people that know. And I'm not so sure how that would differ from where we are now: those that know lead. Can you explain? Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 28/11/2013 08:46, Stephan Kulow a écrit :

But this means we can't make this a christmas gift list. We have to consider where our skills are and then move.

it's a simple loop: we can do only what we already did... changing goals (eventually) may attract new skills and push some of us to gain new skills - for example, I never used mediawiki before working with openSUSE... that said I'm quite comfortable with the way openSUSE work now, I don't see so much anarchy. Just some major changes (systemd...) should be more... I don't find the right word. when a major change is unevitable (often in linux world), the community should be largely informed, the testers asked to test again, the writers asker to write on it etc. the people in charge of the change can say: "linux kernel is moving this way, we have no choice than following, we need help to make the move as fluent as possible".. you mean? other example: grub2: I was nearly frightenned by the way it was announced, but when I really used it find it very similar to the old one and easy to manage. just an information workflow to adapt.. and, by the way, we could in such situation create a "upgrading team", aimed to help, if some people have a script that is broken by a change, special care should be done to fix this (apparmor/dovecot problem, just now, for example) this is *not* a strategy change, but can change much the strategy acceptance. thanks jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi Per, check the differences between: The Linux you work with, for a living and The Linux you work with for a living commas are relevant. For some, openSUSE might be just the Linux you work with. For others, it might be the Linux you work with for a living. Susanne was the person who came up with this sentence that summarizes the proposal. I liked it right away. If any of you have a better suggestion after reading the proposal please share it. On Wednesday 27 November 2013 19:36:58 Per Jessen wrote:

agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

...

Overhauled openSUSE Release ===========================

Once we have established the basis, we think we can concentrate in our current user base. That is, end users and non-OS developers that needs a solid base.

We see the openSUSE Release focused on two main targets: * A desktop and a server oriented release that target end users that work everyday with their computers.

That would be me and my company, I would welcome this very much.

...

In summary, we propose to focus in the direction where we already shine:

The Linux you work with, for a living.

I like the concept, and have been working with openSUSE Linux for a living since 2004. With a good dose of frustration every and now and then. When you work with something for a living, it has to remain fairly stable, you can't be introducing your employees to a new steep learning curve every other day.

...

Share your thoughts ===================

There are some questions we would like you to answer:

1) Do you agree with the proposed goals?

They're perhaps a bit hazy yet, but it sounds good so far.

...

2) Are there any other aspects relevant in this discussion? Can you summarize them?

Wrt "A desktop and a server oriented release that target end users that work everyday with their computers.", it would be good to define the "end users" in this context more precisely. For instance, where should/would openSUSE place itself when compared to SLED/SLES?

...

4) How do you think we should proceed in order to go from these ideas to real actions?

Start by identifying which areas need attention. For instance, for a professional Linux user or admin, which problems do we create today? In which areas do we lack attention to better suit a professional environment? Basically take a good look at the perceived/intended end user, and see where we clash or could have a better fit.

-- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Per Jessen writes:

agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

...

commas are relevant. For some, openSUSE might be just the Linux you work with. For others, it might be the Linux you work with for a living.

That's a very subtle difference, if any at all. I don't quite get it, can someone spell it out for me? If I read the sentence with the comma and pause before "for a living", it does't seem to change much? The "for a living" part remains an important qualifier.

Agreed. The sentence comes from the thought process that lead to this discussion. There is flavors of serious use.A oS:Factory contributing student certainly is working with openSUSE, but not for a living. That part imposes additional constraints that you have immediately identified:

...

The Linux you work with, for a living.

I like the concept, and have been working with openSUSE Linux for a living since 2004. With a good dose of frustration every and now and then. When you work with something for a living, it has to remain fairly stable, you can't be introducing your employees to a new steep learning curve every other day.

Yep, an ever current rock solid Factory is something a developer and a contributor want and value, and that is cool if you don't have additional dependencies deployed on top, as in "for a living". So there is a need for a released version, too.

Wrt "A desktop and a server oriented release that target end users that work everyday with their computers.", it would be good to define the "end users" in this context more precisely.

Go ahead :) This part more than anything is a community project of professionals around openSUSE. People like yourself.

For instance, where should/would openSUSE place itself when compared to SLED/SLES?

openSUSE is good for many cases, depending on the community it may even become better than it is today, but when you need more than a volunteer community can generate, you should easily and without pain be able to move to SLES. That move obviously also helps the project. There is only a limited energy available for openSUSE releases and their mainteance updates. If you --- as a professional --- need more for your customer than what the community provides, much longer maintenance, certified hardware, higher-end hardware, certified applications for your customer, then both your customer and you will be better served with SLE. Where do you, as a professional using openSUSE, see the transition area between the two? Where would you like to see it? S. -- Susanne Oberhauser SUSE LINUX Products GmbH +49-911-74053-574 Maxfeldstraße 5 Processes and Infrastructure 90409 Nürnberg GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 07:48:05PM +0100, jdd wrote:

Le 02/12/2013 19:01, Susanne Oberhauser-Hirschoff a écrit :

...

There is only a limited energy available for openSUSE releases and their mainteance updates. If you --- as a professional --- need more for your customer than what the community provides, much longer maintenance, certified hardware, higher-end hardware, certified applications for your customer, then both your customer and you will be better served with SLE.

Where do you, as a professional using openSUSE, see the transition area between the two? Where would you like to see it?

if this is the problem, why was it not said before :-) - it's a valuable question.

AFAIK, SLES/SLED can have up to 7 years maintenance (exact numbers do not matters), Red Hat have till *13* years

https://access.redhat.com/site/support/policy/updates/errata/

this is called stability :-)

Actually SLE11 and later will have 10 years regular and 3 years extended maintenance. So 13 years. I think Redhats last 3 years are self-service, so no real support. Just for the record. Ciao, Marcus -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Monday 02 December 2013 18.01:06 Susanne Oberhauser-Hirschoff wrote:

There is only a limited energy available for openSUSE releases and their mainteance updates. If you --- as a professional --- need more for your customer than what the community provides, much longer maintenance, certified hardware, higher-end hardware, certified applications for your customer, then both your customer and you will be better served with SLE.

Unfortunately I can only disagree with this. I've try several time to place SLE as the key stone for infrastructure. (Small and Mid-size) and each time I was hit by 2 points. Most of the time the technologies available in SLE were too behind with the project needs. For some just a question of bad timing, with the release of SP Others just feature absolutely not available (Replacing any Microsoft AD for example), our samba4 packaging is totally lacking this. So the option was to use openSUSE for the available technologies, and also too much time, let the customer in a non-free world. This sucks, sorry to say that. SLE is perfect once you know you will need it for 3 to 5 years (or more). -- Bruno Friedmann Ioda-Net Sàrl www.ioda-net.ch openSUSE Member GPG KEY : D5C9B751C4653227 irc: tigerfoot -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/04/2013 04:11 PM, Per Jessen wrote:

Susanne Oberhauser-Hirschoff wrote:

...

Per Jessen writes:

<snip>

...

Go ahead :)

This part more than anything is a community project of professionals around openSUSE. People like yourself.

Thanks, Susanne - if(!) it were up to me, I would propose we make decisions/changes such that we accomodate the following user-groups in order of priority:

1) "for a living"-users 2) admins of "for a living"-users 3) current users (developers, hobbyists, plain users. mediacenters ... 4) admins of the above. 5) new users.

I am myself in the top three/four groups, having grown from a 5 to a 3 to a 4 to a 1 to 2. (over twenty years).

I guess in one way or another this is were at least part of the rubber meets the road. Why would those that contribute, contribute primarily for a target audience that they are not part of? Yes, I am making the assumption that most of our contributors are not of the "for a living" kind or depend on openSUSE in their "for a living" time. If any particular group of contributors wants to chase the elusive group of "for a living" and believes there are contributors to be found there is nothing stopping this group from doing so. However having that as an overall direction for the majority of contributors appears out of place. In the open source world, and many articles and books have been written about this, contributors participate not with the goal to make someone else happy. Yes, having users for your stuff is great, but in the end most contributors are probably here to scratch their own itch. I will maintain my packages in the distribution if we have 1, 10, or 1,000,000 users. It's all the same to me. Further it is all the same to me if those users are of the "for a living" kind, or hobbyist, or school kids, poor or rich. I think I am not alone in this respect. If one wants people to care primarily about the needs of others than one has to pay them. That's what SUSE does with SLE. Slow down the pace of open source development enough to mostly meet the needs of even the most conservative business users. Currently this means one can get support for 10 years and if one's wallet is big enough one can probably squeeze out a few more years. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hey, On 04.12.2013 22:49, Robert Schweikert wrote:

I will maintain my packages in the distribution if we have 1, 10, or 1,000,000 users. It's all the same to me. Further it is all the same to me if those users are of the "for a living" kind, or hobbyist, or school kids, poor or rich. I think I am not alone in this respect.

This is exactly why I think that we're not in some kind of "market". Market logic and assumptions do not apply to us and what we do. We don't exchange currency for goods and services. We don't even barter. The opposite is true: The intangible asset of our own egos satisfaction and reputation among other hackers is what we strive for. This is an endless resource so competing for it doesn't happen. We are also not competing for anything with other Free and Open Source distributions, the opposite is true: We collaborate with them for a common goal, even if we might disagree on the way to do it. We are a "great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches". We do not direct our resources to maximize our "profit". The opposite is true: We're solving our own and our friends problems/challenges, often in the simplest way we can. I think the basic assumption of all of this is wrong and we don't have to do anything except to continue to frame, foster, accompany and patronize the things the members of our community want to do. This is what has brought us here and this is what will carry us into the future. Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi, for a user or a contributor, openSUSE is the Linux you work with. For a professional developer (user or contributor) or for an entity that invest (time or resources) in openSUSE ecosystem, it would be .... for a living. On Monday 02 December 2013 15:11:57 Per Jessen wrote:

agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

...

Hi Per,

check the differences between:

The Linux you work with, for a living

and

The Linux you work with for a living

commas are relevant. For some, openSUSE might be just the Linux you work with. For others, it might be the Linux you work with for a living.

That's a very subtle difference, if any at all. I don't quite get it, can someone spell it out for me? If I read the sentence with the comma and pause before "for a living", it does't seem to change much? The "for a living" part remains an important qualifier.

/Per

-- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/02/2013 07:51 AM, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

Hi Per,

check the differences between:

The Linux you work with, for a living

and

The Linux you work with for a living

Grammar lessons, great. I want to play, I've got one..... Lets eat grandma. or Lets eat, grandma

commas are relevant.

Yes they are ;) Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi, did I understand you correctly if I say that you propose that openSUSE focus on gamers? On Thursday 28 November 2013 13:41:13 Vincent Moutoussamy wrote:

Hi,

2) Are there any other aspects relevant in this discussion? Can you summarize them?

Speaking of the desktop focus and how to attract more users or being cooler than other distro, maybe we have to be interested by the "gaming wave" that is coming to the linux world.

This mean to provide an easy way to install/update the latest version of : - graphic drivers, - Steam !! (http://en.opensuse.org/Steam), - Voice chat software for gaming, - wine.

OBS is really cool, but I doubt that basic desktop end user takes time to understand what it is when he wants to play.

Regards,

On 11/27/2013 05:40 PM, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

...

Hi,

following yesterday's mail[1], we introduce some of the ideas we would like to discuss with you in order to create a common big picture we can share. This big picture is relevant in order to define the actions to execute the following months/ years.

[1] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2013-11/msg00094.html

What do we want to achieve? Goals =================================

1) Add focus to increase alignment among contributors.

2) Foster the community and the user base.

- Starting from our current community, we want to keep increasing the

number of contributors, specially those working on core parts of the distribution/project.

- The openSUSE user base needs to grow. We propose to be even more open

to new niches.

3) Catalyze openSUSE maturity process.

- openSUSE has an interesting number of contributors. Now we think it is

time to reinforce our structures.

- Having more solid structures/groups will allow openSUSE to assume more

responsibilities and deliver.

- In general, we think we need few rules but good ones, easy to follow and

analyze.

4) Attract new players by becoming more attractive to new players.

- The Free Software ecosystem is now full of companies/non-profits that use,> deploy, develop and/or understand Free Software and its benefits.

- We want to support ideas toward increasing our value for them so they

come to openSUSE and become good citizens of the project.

Based on these goals, there are 4 aspects we propose to focus on:

Enhanced Factory ================

We would like to put effort in Factory in the following direction: * New process getting the best of Factory, Tumbeweed and devel projects. We

need everybody contributing in a single point for a single purpose. We are just too few to spread efforts.

* Improve development process based on our strengths. What are we very good

at? Let's base the new process on that.

* Clarify roles and responsibilities. Redesign processes so we increase the

community participation in key areas. Teams instead of champions.

* More stability and QA. Testing before submitting. Factory should be usable.

* Rolling distribution based on release early/release often principle.

This proposal will be more in depth described tomorrow on Factory mailing list where we will expand the bullet points mentioned here.

Overhauled openSUSE Release ===========================

Once we have established the basis, we think we can concentrate in our current user base. That is, end users and non-OS developers that needs a solid base.

We see the openSUSE Release focused on two main targets: * A desktop and a server oriented release that target end users that work

everyday with their computers.

* Using OBS repositories to cover further use cases.

- The idea is to initially target developers that need a stable base and

tools on top.

- Another interesting use case are derivatives. There could be more.

Principles that would drive our efforts: * Stability and quality as core values.

- We can make the more stable distribution for users based on Green values.

* Longer release cycle.

* Enhanced maintenance model

* OBS can be use in a smart and efficient way to add flexibility to this model.> - People that needs stable base but recent version of tools. - New niches: big data, NoSQL, new programming languages, cloud....

Open Governance Model =====================

Our Governance model has improved over the years. We would like to work with the community the following years in taking some steps further.

* Technical governance model adapted to our new development processes: very

few but clearer rules. Mentoring ecosystem.

* Project governance model: evolution from our current model while keeping our> core values. More efficient structure to accomplish the project goals.

- SUSE role evolution: Owner (2005) -> Main sponsor -> Patron, together with other players.

Where can SUSE add value, beyond supporting ideas like the ones described (or others)?

Ralf Flaxa in his keynote [2] pointed some ideas where SUSE could complement openSUSE, increasing SUSE's contribution. We would like to hear your feedback about these or other ideas to define how we can achieve this goal.

[2] http://youtu.be/fdroo2JZano

In summary, we propose to focus in the direction where we already shine:

The Linux you work with, for a living.

Share your thoughts ===================

There are some questions we would like you to answer:

1) Do you agree with the proposed goals?

2) Are there any other aspects relevant in this discussion? Can you summarize> them?

3) Which are the major risks you see in this view?

4) How do you think we should proceed in order to go from these ideas to real> actions?

5) What suggestions do you have for this "New Factory" and "New Release"?

Please add any other comments or ideas you have in this or a separate thread.

Saludos

-- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Vincent Moutoussamy wrote:

Hi,

2) Are there any other aspects relevant in this discussion? Can you summarize them?

Speaking of the desktop focus and how to attract more users or being cooler than other distro, maybe we have to be interested by the "gaming wave" that is coming to the linux world.

This mean to provide an easy way to install/update the latest version of : - graphic drivers, - Steam !! (http://en.opensuse.org/Steam), - Voice chat software for gaming, - wine.

I suggest an area of focus we currently miss is team building infrastructure. As a short term goal, if small teams is going to work well a video conferencing needs to be targeted, supported and used by the project teams. Google hangouts is a real option, but it depends on a plugin from google. As of yesterday, the plugin on Google's site didn't work with 13.1. Getting the plugin into OBS or packman would allow it to be part of the team building infrastructure. I don't know what other video conferencing options are out there as options, but I think it is important more team building infrastructure be put in place and videoconferencing should be an immediate priority. Greg -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 28.11.2013 17:20, Togan Muftuoglu wrote:

...

...

...

...

...

"Greg" == Greg Freemyer writes:

Greg> I suggest an area of focus we currently miss is team building Greg> infrastructure.

Greg> As a short term goal, if small teams is going to work well a video Greg> conferencing needs to be targeted, supported and used by the project Greg> teams.

Greg> Google hangouts is a real option, but it depends on a plugin from Greg> google. As of yesterday, the plugin on Google's site didn't work Greg> with 13.1.

Unfortunately Google hangout wants you to have a Google+ account and I don't want to have such an account. So what ever the solution for videoconferencing is going to be used, should provide flexibilty

Yes, a free and secure alternative to G hangouts and/or skype working out of the box would be one of the features which could bring us back the attributes "cool" and "innovative". Klaas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 12:05 PM, jdd wrote:

Le 28/11/2013 17:25, Klaas Freitag a écrit :

...

Yes, a free and secure alternative to G hangouts and/or skype working out of the box would be one of the features which could bring us back the attributes "cool" and "innovative".

not sure.

are you sure most team members are fulent enough in spoken english to handle a video meeting? I'm sure I'm not!

read, speak, may be, but listen and uderstand on skype certainly no and even on video, not sure

jdd

I don't know, but maybe there could be the equivalent of IRC channels in various languages. I was thinking further about this, even if it cost a little money, having a true openSUSE videoconference service of its own would not only be great of team building (if the teams can find a shared language), it would also be a cool benefit for openSUSE team members to be provided an account where they could do videoconferences for their own purposes. I'm not sure how that would work exactly, but it seems like an area for brainstorming to me. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Friday 29 November 2013 08:38:36 Klaus Kaempf wrote:

* Klaas Freitag [Nov 28. 2013 17:25]:

...

Yes, a free and secure alternative to G hangouts and/or skype working out of the box would be one of the features which could bring us back the attributes "cool" and "innovative".

Like https://palava.tv ? ;-)

It's a browser-to-browser video conferencing system, based on WebRTC (needs a recent Firefox or Chrome).

Source is at https://github.com/palavatv, works nice with openSUSE.

Is it any good? I'd love to get rid of Google hangouts (we use them a lot for conversations)... I'll try when I can :D /J

Klaus

On 11/28/2013 09:47 AM, Greg Freemyer wrote:

Vincent Moutoussamy wrote:

...

Hi,

2) Are there any other aspects relevant in this discussion? Can you summarize them?

Speaking of the desktop focus and how to attract more users or being cooler than other distro, maybe we have to be interested by the "gaming wave" that is coming to the linux world.

This mean to provide an easy way to install/update the latest version of : - graphic drivers, - Steam !! (http://en.opensuse.org/Steam), - Voice chat software for gaming, - wine.

I suggest an area of focus we currently miss is team building infrastructure.

As a short term goal, if small teams is going to work well a video conferencing needs to be targeted, supported and used by the project teams.

Google hangouts is a real option, but it depends on a plugin from google. As of yesterday, the plugin on Google's site didn't work with 13.1.

Well, it appears to be hit or miss. The plugin works fine on my desktop (13.1 x86_64 installed from scratch with much grumbling) but dumps on my laptop (13.1 x86_64) upgraded via zypper dup. I have not had the time to dig into the differences, could be the video driver, who knows.... But that's a different thread ;) Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Manu Gupta - 22:18 28.11.13 wrote:

...

...

* Longer release cycle.

Is there really a very good reason for a longer release cycle. I mean what kind of problems will it solve? What is openSUSE team really expecting out of it?

Well, I would say that every release consumes quite some resources. Partially it is because of the current state of Factory when we have to polish and stabilize it to get in the shape decent enough for release. But there is also a lot of other stuff - careful testing, marketing, artwork, documentation, ... So in general, longer the release cycle, the more energy we can spend elsewhere. Another piece of puzzle is support. If we would have a month long release cycle, we could not support releases for two years as it would mean supporting 24 four releases and configuration all the time. And that would take insanely huge amounts of efforts. On the other hand, if we release once every five years, we have to support the released version for at least that five years. It would be tough as the software there would be old, but it would be much easier than supporting 5 different releases with oldest one closing to four years. So release cycle is about balancing resources, if we want longer support, we should probably release less often so we don't support so many things at once and we save some effort we can put into maintenance. And if Factory gets more stable I see no reason to releasing too often... -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Friday 29 November 2013 09.50:30 Stephan Kulow wrote:

On 29.11.2013 09:24, Michal Hrusecky wrote:

...

So release cycle is about balancing resources, if we want longer support, we should probably release less often so we don't support so many things at once and we save some effort we can put into maintenance. And if Factory gets more stable I see no reason to releasing too often...

Balancing resources and balancing expectations. If you release only every 5 years, it might be perfect for those that are interested to run a server for 5 years unmodified but supported. But it also means people installing new servers will turn away from openSUSE over time. In the 4th year people won't install it anymore as it's only supported one more year.

The other variable is developer interest. Like it or not, but developers like to develop, not maintain. So you need to keep the release interesting for the developers.

And one final thing is reliability. People want us to be reliable. They need to know what we'll do in the future at the time they decide if or not to skip a release.

Greetings, Stephan

A two or three years rock stable ( can be tainted by obs repository (Stable too) for stability and a stable usable factory for rolling.(which could be dev's desktop, gamer's desktop, or dev server too) I think that 3+ years stable things are really something dedicated for SLE -- Bruno Friedmann Ioda-Net Sàrl www.ioda-net.ch openSUSE Member GPG KEY : D5C9B751C4653227 irc: tigerfoot -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Saturday 30 November 2013 11.54:38 jdd wrote:

Le 30/11/2013 11:40, Bruno Friedmann a écrit :

...

and a stable usable factory for rolling.(which could be dev's desktop, gamer's desktop, or dev server too)

is not "stable" and "factory" contradictory? I have seen this assertion several time since a week or two and have problems with it :-( You're talking about the past (eventually the present) we try to figure out what our future will be so please stick on that.

if it can be managed, it's an other word of a full rolling release? nothing to upgrade ever (or in other words, smoth regular upgrade) - I would love it :-) Then didn't you find your words a bit contradictory themselves. Upgrade is an upgrade.

-- Bruno Friedmann Ioda-Net Sàrl www.ioda-net.ch openSUSE Member GPG KEY : D5C9B751C4653227 irc: tigerfoot -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Sat, 30 Nov 2013 11:54:38 +0100 jdd wrote:

... if it can be managed, it's an other word of a full rolling release? nothing to upgrade ever (or in other words, smoth regular upgrade) - I would love it :-)

When update works as expected we are all happy, but what if it fails? You have to have backups, and start (few) hours journey to have system working again. In other words, time to recover from failed update is a problem why people do not like them, and why they avoid using systems that will need such recovery too often, like Factory. IMHO, solution is to redesign Factory installation to provide easy fall back that will not last more then reboot to the latest working system. With current hardware and openSUSE, it means lesser than a minute. The easiest way would be to have 2 installations, one that we run, and another that is initially just copy of first, but will be updated. After update, reboot and you are in a brand new system. If it works you keep it, if not back to working and report a problem. This would mean that we have only half of disk space, but with basic RAID we waste space at the same rate and we have no protection from failed updates. BTW, with two systems in place we don't have to update grub. Install it once and after verification that it works, don't touch it. Kernel and initrd can be 2 times 2 symlinks to partitions and real kernels and initrds. Once basic system in Factory is stable enough, branch it to release candidate, and create stable release for all those that need stability.

jdd

-- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Sat, 30 Nov 2013 13:48:42 +0100 Bruno Friedmann wrote:

If you pay me the second 1TB ssd drive I need in my laptop I could afford such a system.

As mentioned, if you have RAID 0, you will waste the same amount of storage space, with no protection in case of bad software update, ...

The only way is : Having factory with almost no crash or clash.

... but if you need whole terabyte, out of 1 terabyte then you are better served with stable release. I don't need 1 TB, and that is the fact for 90% of computer users. We can use (test) Factory on a bare metal for us and you :) Having factory with no crash is fine ideal, but without bare metal testing it is just halfway jump over a chasm.

Why I stop debugging and using factory, was the fact that I lost ~12 days of full paid days in a year. This represent a big amount of money (the real one). And also a pure lost of useful contribution time.

Right, but there will be always some place on assembly line that is used to test new products. It will have horrible fail rate, even if not outright broken. We call it Factory, other may have different names.

I want to contribute, more and more, help me ! :-)

Another benefit of double installation is ability to have repositories with development projects of own interest integrated in testing, That way one can have the latest in graphics with ability to feed info back to openSUSE and upstream. Currently with stable feedback is late, even when still valid. -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi, On Saturday 30 November 2013 13:48:42 Bruno Friedmann wrote:

On Saturday 30 November 2013 06.40:51 Rajko wrote:

...

The easiest way would be to have 2 installations, one that we run, and another that is initially just copy of first, but will be updated. After update, reboot and you are in a brand new system. If it works you keep it, if not back to working and report a problem.

This would mean that we have only half of disk space, but with basic RAID we waste space at the same rate and we have no protection from failed updates.

BTW, with two systems in place we don't have to update grub. Install it once and after verification that it works, don't touch it. Kernel and initrd can be 2 times 2 symlinks to partitions and real kernels and initrds.

If you pay me the second 1TB ssd drive I need in my laptop I could afford such a system. The only way is : Having factory with almost no crash or clash.

Why I stop debugging and using factory, was the fact that I lost ~12 days of full paid days in a year. This represent a big amount of money (the real one). And also a pure lost of useful contribution time.

Bruno, you are a professional that work everyday with openSUSE and a contributor. For you, the compromise between contribution time, production time and "learning" time is key to "survive" in this ecosystem in the future. For a student, for instance, this compromise is different. The learning time (debugging/reinstalling/trying) might be more relevant. For a professional that do not contribute, is the production time what defines if openSUSE is the right choice.... You and some others that I have met this past 18 months have a privileged balanced vision of the picture that we can create with the pieces of the puzzle we have. We need more pedagogy from people like you. I have the feeling that, through the years, for unknown reasons to me, you have became more and more silent despite the fact you still use/love openSUSE. Where are you? We will need you in this journey.

I want to contribute, more and more, help me !

Exactly. It is the same message Ralf Flaxa sent in his keynote, right? Let me ask you this question..... Where should the project move in order for me to contribute more?

:-)

Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi, "You" = second person plural. I know you are a busy man. Bruno Friedmann wrote:

...

We need more pedagogy from people like you. I have the feeling that,

On Sunday 01 December 2013 12.14:50 agustin benito bethencourt wrote: through

...

the years, for unknown reasons to me, you have became more and more silent despite the fact you still use/love openSUSE.

Come on, just only months ...

...

Where are you? We will need you in this journey.

I'm running after the freight-train of mails :-) And has to fix in emergency a crashed btrfs 12.3 system by moving it to stable efficient ext4 this morning which has ruined my plan to give the feedback the community deserve on the new plans.

But I will, you can count on it! And if you forget, I've also a campaign to run ;-)

I hate you to send all this good stuff 3 weeks before Christmas, I love you to have thrown it in public :-)

--

Bruno Friedmann Ioda-Net Sàrl www.ioda-net.ch

openSUSE Member GPG KEY : D5C9B751C4653227 irc: tigerfoot -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

-- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Rajko - 6:40 30.11.13 wrote:

On Sat, 30 Nov 2013 11:54:38 +0100 jdd wrote:

...

... if it can be managed, it's an other word of a full rolling release? nothing to upgrade ever (or in other words, smoth regular upgrade) - I would love it :-)

When update works as expected we are all happy, but what if it fails?

You have to have backups, and start (few) hours journey to have system working again.

In other words, time to recover from failed update is a problem why people do not like them, and why they avoid using systems that will need such recovery too often, like Factory.

IMHO, solution is to redesign Factory installation to provide easy fall back that will not last more then reboot to the latest working system. With current hardware and openSUSE, it means lesser than a minute.

snapper? -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi Manu, On Thursday 28 November 2013 22:18:42 Manu Gupta wrote:

Hi Agustin,

Let me try to answer your queries and I have a few questions of mine as well.

I find nothing new in a lot of things you have enumerated here. Please have a look at it http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Strategy

It is how it should be since many the proposal comes from analyzing also the community documentation, interviewing community members, talking to them in events, in the office..... The proposal is about increasing focus, not about spread it by pursuing a new goals. Among the several possibilities we came through, we chose the closest and most compatible with who we are. We looked to base the proposal on our strengths and already shared values, not new ones. This is key to succeed, in my opinion. The lack of ideas is not a problem in openSUSE. So it should not surprise you that there are not many new ideas.

1) Add focus to increase alignment among contributors. What kind of focus are you talking about? I am not sure Can you explain a bit?

...

3) Catalyze openSUSE maturity process.

- openSUSE has an interesting number of contributors. Now we think it is

time to reinforce our structures.

- Having more solid structures/groups will allow openSUSE to assume more

responsibilities and deliver.

- In general, we think we need few rules but good ones, easy to follow and

analyze.

* Rolling distribution based on release early/release often principle.

Is it not conflicting with the below points, longer release cycles?

What we are proposing is decoupling our distribution, so instead of delivering a compromise between what distro developers and users need, we provide a better solution for both of them. And we propose to do this is an achievable way, in my opinion.

...

* Using OBS repositories to cover further use cases.

- The idea is to initially target developers that need a stable base and

tools on top.

- Another interesting use case are derivatives. There could be more.

Derivatives are usually community owned, in past we publicized SUSE Studio. Also, do we really have the man power (being realistic) to churn out more derivatives from within the community?

Derivatives are the consequence of having a solid base others can build solution for their needs upon. Our main role would be to create that base. With our tools and our values, we would have a better chance to attract people interested in creating them. The proposal is not about providing solutions directly as much as creating the conditions for other to come and create them.

...

Principles that would drive our efforts: * Stability and quality as core values.

- We can make the more stable distribution for users based on Green values.

This has been discussed numerous times and everyone agrees on it. Why do we need to reestablish it?

Because it is so important for the proposal that I did not wanted to take it for granted.

...

* Longer release cycle.

Is there really a very good reason for a longer release cycle. I mean what kind of problems will it solve? What is openSUSE team really expecting out of it?

The Release cycle is not a goal, is a tool.... to achieve users and production needs. It is also a relevant reference check point for each milestone of the development, integration, stabilization and promotion process of any distro release. What is the Release cycle that our users need? Among all the possibilities we have, which one also addresses our development needs and constrains? If we want to adapt our distribution to developers we need to bring them in different layers/areas of the distribution new software, which means that we need to update the Soft. versions often. If we want to adapt to "professional users" (not corporate users), we need to bring them a solid system, with well proven technologies, putting extra effort in other areas like deployments, usability, translations, etc. So, since in the "new release" we propose to target users that work with openSUSE, we need to bring them values that, in some areas, require time to deliver. But there is also other elements to consider. Developers or power users are capable of consuming the software very fast. The time between the software is released by us (project) and they have it installed is low. So releasing frequently is a "feature". The time that users that work with openSUSE (non devs) requires to consume the software is longer. In some cases so long that they skip releases. How much effort from our side is "not consumed" by a user that require more that 8 months to make an update worth it for his particular "use case"? I would say..... a lot. There are more well known factors associated to cost, maintenance, scalability, etc. So we do not try to solve any problem with the Release cycle. We simply propose to adapt our release cycle to our users need, taking in consideration internal factors and constrains. The exact "cadence" needs to come as a consequence of the definition of the Action Plan for the Release, not now.

...

Open Governance Model =====================

Our Governance model has improved over the years. We would like to work with the community the following years in taking some steps further.

* Technical governance model adapted to our new development processes: very

few but clearer rules. Mentoring ecosystem.

Again how do you plan to have a mentoring ecosystem. I am not sure again. Mentoring takes a lot of time and few people have been willing to put in that kind of effort.

Mentoring is a culture you deliver by creating policies and processes that requires and/or promote training to improve or increase your skills and responsibilities within the project. Two examples we are trying to push... 1.- Increase the training hours in oSC. This action would benefit from "packaging these training sessions" to make them replicable in some other events we are attending to. It also needs a little more focus on needs. Right now the focus in on the offer side. To simplify..... the content offer is based on the trainers desires more than on the contributors demands/needs. We can have a better balance. This is a point in which SUSE can add value in our community. 2.- As you can see in the proposal for factory, we have defined several roles with different duties and levels of expertise required. By defining policies that promote that those who assume a certain role train others to also assume that same role, we are giving steps toward promoting that culture. 3.- The openSUSE Team has become in the last months part of SUSE training program. We have trainees with us. We will publish a blog post with more details about this. This is an internal action but with external impact also.

...

There are some questions we would like you to answer:

1) Do you agree with the proposed goals?

We are bringing topics that have already been discussed, we just need to move forward and I believe we are doing so again and again.

I understand your frustration. I counted on it in every step of the process that have led us here. This is one of the reasons I wanted to make sure we came here with something solid enough to be credible and open enough to leave room for "chefs". It is a very hard compromise to achieve. Being open to adapt the proposal to our (project) needs and desires can balance this compromise. I would also like to tell you that is our plan to support these ideas we are presenting with executing effort. The proposal is not only about defining direction, it is also about defining actions. This makes the proposal more interesting, I hope. If the process comes to a successful ending, we will define the execution plans (sprints) and begin to work asap. What I want is to make sure we is that, in general, the openSUSE Team can define a sustained effort for a few months instead of reacting to what comes. I think we can spread that vision to other areas of the project. Many of you participate upstream. This idea could be the "equivalent" of a major release approach/design. Translated to our context, we are proposing a possible next "major release".

What I believe is : 1. We need to stop discussing things what have been already discussed

If you change the context, the picture that comes from discussed ideas might change. We need to revisit some of them.

2. If we all know that something is missing, then let us take them and discuss one by one.

Can you elaborate this further? I do not understand you.

...

2) Are there any other aspects relevant in this discussion? Can you summarize> them?

3) Which are the major risks you see in this view?

4) How do you think we should proceed in order to go from these ideas to real> actions?

5) What suggestions do you have for this "New Factory" and "New Release"?

None so far, but really is the New Release really worth it, will it actually solve a lot of problems ( I am not a factory contributor, so my views can be discarded ).

...

Please add any other comments or ideas you have in this or a separate thread.

Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/01/2013 09:17 PM, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

...

...

* Using OBS repositories to cover further use cases.

- The idea is to initially target developers that need a stable base and

tools on top.

- Another interesting use case are derivatives. There could be more. Derivatives are usually community owned, in past we publicized SUSE Studio. Also, do we really have the man power (being realistic) to churn out more derivatives from within the community? Derivatives are the consequence of having a solid base others can build solution for their needs upon. Our main role would be to create that base. With our tools and our values, we would have a better chance to attract people interested in creating them.

The proposal is not about providing solutions directly as much as creating the conditions for other to come and create them.

Personally i hate the idea of derivatives, i think one of openSUSE's strengths is its lack of derivatives. There is no need for derivatives because it is easy to submit the software you want into openSUSE without having a organization putting restrictions on you (Ubuntu), or long testing periods like debian. openSUSE's base is good enough that you don't need to create derivatives. I much prefer the openSUSE approach of a DVD with almost everything, to having separate kubuntu xubuntu *buntu distributions. At the same time having worked on Enlightenment for openSUSE i know there's not much spare room on that DVD so maybe it is worth looking at providing openSUSE DVD's for different subsets so size is a lesser restriction like a openSUSE DVD with developer tools, or server / admin or design. Similar to the openSUSE for education. Doing it by creating a whole bunch of derivative distro's though just leads to fragmentation in my opinion Anyway that all this is (My opinion) so have a good day Simon -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hello all, I've been following the 2016 picture thread and would like to share with you guys what I think. In the thread was mentioned, that the openSUSE project should focus on developers being main target of the project. But here arises the question: why are so many people using Ubuntu and Mint? Why are desktop users with non technical background using it? The key to everything is the user-base. Even the Grandma of the average Joe is a big plus! Every one more user you have as a distro is important, because Joe's grandma is increasing the user base (measurable via webcounters/browser ID etc) and will attract 3rd parties to provide their software for openSUSE. This 3rd party software maybe a _must_ for Tom who is a developer. Maybe other grandma's will ask their grandchildren (which may like openSUSE then too) to get openSUSE for them because they liked it when they drank tea with Joe's grandma (I know this is far-fetched but it's an example) which again brings more users. What do you need to make them install openSUSE over Ubuntu? A Killer Feature. What is needed to make them stick with openSUSE and recommend it to others? Quality. The killer features for each target group differs. But there are two things almost every target user group wants: Stability and Compatibility. Ubuntu already has their killer features software center, unity (hated by ones, loved by others), a big collection of ppa's. When I started to write this reply I wanted to start a new thread with an idea for openSUSE packages but this is long enough to be a reply on it's own so I'll make another thread with the idea but without my opinion on the 2016 picture Regards, Damian 2013/12/1 jdd :

Le 01/12/2013 12:39, Simon a écrit :

...

at providing openSUSE DVD's for different subsets so size is a lesser restriction like a openSUSE DVD with developer tools, or server /

may be set the "dvd" size more on the flash key size than on dvd.

4bg are 3.5gb, but 8Gb are 7.5 and pretty cheap. presently I need a 8Bg to write a "dvd" image, plenty of spare

jdd

-- http://www.dodin.org

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-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Simon wrote:

On 12/01/2013 10:09 PM, Simon wrote:

...

On 12/01/2013 09:17 PM, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

...

...

...

* Using OBS repositories to cover further use cases.

- The idea is to initially target developers that need a

stable

...

...

...

base and tools on top. - Another interesting use case are derivatives. There could be more. Derivatives are usually community owned, in past we publicized SUSE Studio. Also, do we really have the man power (being realistic) to churn out more derivatives from within the community? Derivatives are the consequence of having a solid base others can build solution for their needs upon. Our main role would be to create that

...

...

base. With our tools and our values, we would have a better chance to attract people interested in creating them.

The proposal is not about providing solutions directly as much as creating the conditions for other to come and create them. Personally i hate the idea of derivatives, i think one of openSUSE's strengths is its lack of derivatives. There is no need for derivatives because it is easy to submit the software you want into openSUSE without having a organization putting restrictions on you (Ubuntu), or long testing periods like debian. openSUSE's base is good enough that

...

you don't need to create derivatives. I much prefer the openSUSE approach of a DVD with almost everything, to having separate kubuntu xubuntu *buntu distributions. At the same time having worked on Enlightenment for openSUSE i know there's not much spare room on that DVD so maybe it is worth looking at providing openSUSE DVD's for different subsets so size is a lesser

...

restriction like a openSUSE DVD with developer tools, or server / admin or design. Similar to the openSUSE for education. Doing it by creating a whole bunch of derivative distro's though just leads to fragmentation in my opinion Anyway that all this is (My opinion) so have a good day

Simon

Sorry to double post but just to make it clear, after installing any of

these dvd's the same normal openSUSE oss and non-oss repositories would

be available allowing anyone to install any openSUSE package.

Simon

The success of susestudio proves you wrong. Thousands of users want their own preconfigured boot media, and all based on suse / opensuse. That is 1000s of "advanced users" that the statistics presented ignore. Many of those thousands are developers. My personal contribution path was User => susestudio user => obs user (to build packages I wanted on my susestudio appliance) => factory submitter Anyway, susestudio and obs combined make for a fantastic pairing. I don't know if susestudio has any team support functionality. If not, adding that class of functionality would better help openSUSE support the team concept. Is susestudio within scope for these discussions? Greg -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/03/2013 01:06 AM, Greg Freemyer wrote:

Simon wrote:

...

On 12/01/2013 10:09 PM, Simon wrote:

...

...

...

...

* Using OBS repositories to cover further use cases.

- The idea is to initially target developers that need a stable base and tools on top. - Another interesting use case are derivatives. There could be more. Derivatives are usually community owned, in past we publicized SUSE Studio. Also, do we really have the man power (being realistic) to churn out more derivatives from within the community? Derivatives are the consequence of having a solid base others can build solution for their needs upon. Our main role would be to create that base. With our tools and our values, we would have a better chance to attract people interested in creating them.

The proposal is not about providing solutions directly as much as creating the conditions for other to come and create them. Personally i hate the idea of derivatives, i think one of openSUSE's strengths is its lack of derivatives. There is no need for derivatives because it is easy to submit the software you want into openSUSE without having a organization putting restrictions on you (Ubuntu), or long testing periods like debian. openSUSE's base is good enough that you don't need to create derivatives. I much prefer the openSUSE approach of a DVD with almost everything, to having separate kubuntu xubuntu *buntu distributions. At the same time having worked on Enlightenment for openSUSE i know

On 12/01/2013 09:17 PM, agustin benito bethencourt wrote: there's not much spare room on that DVD so maybe it is worth looking at providing openSUSE DVD's for different subsets so size is a lesser restriction like a openSUSE DVD with developer tools, or server / admin or design. Similar to the openSUSE for education. Doing it by creating a whole bunch of derivative distro's though just leads to fragmentation in my opinion Anyway that all this is (My opinion) so have a good day

Simon

Sorry to double post but just to make it clear, after installing any of

these dvd's the same normal openSUSE oss and non-oss repositories would

be available allowing anyone to install any openSUSE package.

Simon The success of susestudio proves you wrong. Thousands of users want their own preconfigured boot media, and all based on suse / opensuse.

That is 1000s of "advanced users" that the statistics presented ignore. Many of those thousands are developers.

My personal contribution path was

User => susestudio user => obs user (to build packages I wanted on my susestudio appliance) => factory submitter

Anyway, susestudio and obs combined make for a fantastic pairing.

I don't know if susestudio has any team support functionality. If not, adding that class of functionality would better help openSUSE support the team concept.

Is susestudio within scope for these discussions?

Greg

I certainly wouldn't argue against the fact that there is a large number of people who want to make there own Linux Distro. For people who need to set up a larger number of computers. What i was questioning was the need for derivative distro's that end up with there own artwork/web/support team that really just provide distrox with window manager y and a few other minor changes. All that does is splits community resources for little gain. To summarize mostly i'm concerned about splits and extra effort that could be required if creating derivative's is not managed well. In my opinion a spin off of openSUSE thats marked as openSUSE for education which provides openSUSE with different packages to the main DVD are probably beneficial, creating a "servLinux" which is basicly openSUSE aimed at the server market is probably not ok. Simon -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/03/2013 11:51 AM, Robert Schweikert wrote:

On 12/02/2013 04:39 PM, Simon wrote:

...

On 12/03/2013 01:06 AM, Greg Freemyer wrote:

...

...

On 12/01/2013 10:09 PM, Simon wrote:

...

...

>> * Using OBS repositories to cover further use cases. >> >> - The idea is to initially target developers that need a stable >> base >> and >> tools on top. >> - Another interesting use case are derivatives. There could >> be more. > Derivatives are usually community owned, in past we publicized SUSE > Studio. Also, do we really have the man power (being realistic) to > churn out more derivatives from within the community? Derivatives are the consequence of having a solid base others can build solution for their needs upon. Our main role would be to create that base. With our tools and our values, we would have a better chance to attract people interested in creating them.

The proposal is not about providing solutions directly as much as creating the conditions for other to come and create them. Personally i hate the idea of derivatives, i think one of openSUSE's strengths is its lack of derivatives. There is no need for derivatives because it is easy to submit the software you want into openSUSE without having a organization putting restrictions on you (Ubuntu), or long testing periods like debian. openSUSE's base is good enough that you don't need to create derivatives. I much prefer the openSUSE approach of a DVD with almost everything, to having separate kubuntu xubuntu *buntu distributions. At the same time having worked on Enlightenment for openSUSE i know

On 12/01/2013 09:17 PM, agustin benito bethencourt wrote: there's not much spare room on that DVD so maybe it is worth looking at providing openSUSE DVD's for different subsets so size is a lesser restriction like a openSUSE DVD with developer tools, or server / admin or design. Similar to the openSUSE for education. Doing it by creating a whole bunch of derivative distro's though just leads to fragmentation in my opinion Anyway that all this is (My opinion) so have a good day

Simon

Sorry to double post but just to make it clear, after installing any of

these dvd's the same normal openSUSE oss and non-oss repositories would

be available allowing anyone to install any openSUSE package.

Simon The success of susestudio proves you wrong. Thousands of users want

Simon wrote: their own preconfigured boot media, and all based on suse / opensuse.

That is 1000s of "advanced users" that the statistics presented ignore. Many of those thousands are developers.

My personal contribution path was

User => susestudio user => obs user (to build packages I wanted on my susestudio appliance) => factory submitter

Anyway, susestudio and obs combined make for a fantastic pairing.

I don't know if susestudio has any team support functionality. If not, adding that class of functionality would better help openSUSE support the team concept.

Is susestudio within scope for these discussions?

Greg

I certainly wouldn't argue against the fact that there is a large number of people who want to make there own Linux Distro. For people who need to set up a larger number of computers. What i was questioning was the need for derivative distro's that end up with there own artwork/web/support team that really just provide distrox with window manager y and a few other minor changes. All that does is splits community resources for little gain.

To summarize mostly i'm concerned about splits and extra effort that could be required if creating derivative's is not managed well. In my opinion a spin off of openSUSE thats marked as openSUSE for education which provides openSUSE with different packages to the main DVD are probably beneficial, creating a "servLinux" which is basicly openSUSE aimed at the server market is probably not ok.

Fair enough, but what would you do about it? Forbid a group of people that want to use openSUSE as a base to create "servLinux"? This doesn't really work, everything is open source and as long as they do not violate any trademarks it's all good.

One can make the same argument about CentOS and after all these years it turns out that CentOS actually helps RH even though RH still tries to make the CentOS guys lives as difficult as possible.

Later, Robert

Nah i certainly wouldn't block them i was more referring to official openSUSE derivatives then someone else coming in and making there own distro, if they were going to do that anyway and package some new applications or make some others better then in the long term its better they use openSUSE then something else as there base. Originally my comments were partly in regard to the number of derivatives being used to measure how good a distro is. The rest was personal opinion but also a reminder that if we go down the road of creating derivatives we should be careful to manage and publicize them well to avoid fragmentation in the community. Theres 2 point's that i would consider if the openSUSE comunity was going to go down the road of having official derivatives or spin offs. 1. Users should know that they are still using openSUSE and the place they should go for help and support is openSUSE not somewhere else. I think this is clear with something like openSUSE edu. 2. The second is the use of the word derivative for official spin offs or custom DVD's, generally derivatives are maintained, controlled and run by a group separate from the distribution that it has derived from, so we need to be careful using phrases like that when talking about openSUSE sub projects. Simon -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi,

...

...

Is susestudio within scope for these discussions?

Greg I certainly wouldn't argue against the fact that there is a large number of people who want to make there own Linux Distro. For people who need to set up a larger number of computers. What i was questioning was the need for derivative distro's that end up with there own artwork/web/support team that really just provide distrox with window manager y and a few other minor changes. All that does is splits community resources for little gain.

To summarize mostly i'm concerned about splits and extra effort that could be required if creating derivative's is not managed well. In my opinion a spin off of openSUSE thats marked as openSUSE for education which provides openSUSE with different packages to the main DVD are probably beneficial, creating a "servLinux" which is basicly openSUSE aimed at the server market is probably not ok.

Simon derivatives/spinoffs/personalized distros (Studio)..... all these efforts are oriented on targeting use cases which are not targeted by the root project. There is nothing wrong with that in my opinion. Obviously it can be done in a way that feed the project or subtract energy from it. Those are "implementation details". Agreed

derivatives/spinoffs/personalized distros (Studio) are options that today are somehow based on the fact that we ship a distro with "everything" (or a lot). Then you reduce the number of pieces and/or substitute some... to adapt it to your needs. This is one of the things i liked most about openSUSE when i first started using it. Our lack of derivatives can be a consequence of our current model. when i read lack of derivatives in this sort of context i think mint, kubuntu etc. as derivatives. I think one of the strengths of our current model has also been the fact that we have stayed as one community rather

On 12/04/2013 03:46 AM, Agustin Benito Bethencourt wrote: then having groups of people feel they have been excluded and going off and doing there own thing. This is why i don't like the term derivative.

If we add more focus to the project, if we create a very user centric release, the current model in this regard will need to adapt too.

The natural consequence of the proposed model, at least at the beginning, is that this release will be smaller, since users need less tools/software in general than developers or power users. Increasing the quality also will lead us to focus the current resources in less software. To cover more....we will need more people.

So for derivatives/spinoffs/personalized distros you will add software.

We do not have a clear idea yet on this area since we have not defined an Action Plan proposal for the Release (user centric) but the above model seems natural to me.

A general user DVD stripped of all the developer and server tools would be a great idea, it could focus on stuff lie how fast you can make Linux boot if you don't need to start a bunch of services most users don't need etc. (It should probably be the most tested DVD). I think a build aimed for servers / cloud instances would complement this well. Then we could encourage developers / power users, to do a net install and just install the patterns that they want but i think we should still at least build a one size fits all DVD similar to the current one for power users/ developers who need to set up multiple machines but don't want to go to the effort of setting up there own custom build on SUSE studio.

So in summary, I believe that with the proposed model we open the door for increasing these initiatives. It will be up to us (project) to define how to Govern them in a way that they add energy to the project by becoming an answer to a niche and to us (obviously to themselves too).

Initiatives that complement your project are always good news, I think.

I think as a whole this is a good initiative and that it can set openSUSE apart from others who generally just ship one DVD or split up based on window manager etc, rather then end users need.

Saludos

Have a good day, Simon -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi, On Wednesday, December 04, 2013 07:50:30 AM Simon wrote:

On 12/04/2013 03:46 AM, Agustin Benito Bethencourt wrote:

...

Hi,

...

...

Is susestudio within scope for these discussions?

Greg

I certainly wouldn't argue against the fact that there is a large number of people who want to make there own Linux Distro. For people who need to set up a larger number of computers. What i was questioning was the need for derivative distro's that end up with there own artwork/web/support team that really just provide distrox with window manager y and a few other minor changes. All that does is splits community resources for little gain.

To summarize mostly i'm concerned about splits and extra effort that could be required if creating derivative's is not managed well. In my opinion a spin off of openSUSE thats marked as openSUSE for education which provides openSUSE with different packages to the main DVD are probably beneficial, creating a "servLinux" which is basicly openSUSE aimed at the server market is probably not ok.

Simon

derivatives/spinoffs/personalized distros (Studio)..... all these efforts are oriented on targeting use cases which are not targeted by the root project. There is nothing wrong with that in my opinion. Obviously it can be done in a way that feed the project or subtract energy from it. Those are "implementation details".

Agreed

...

derivatives/spinoffs/personalized distros (Studio) are options that today are somehow based on the fact that we ship a distro with "everything" (or a lot). Then you reduce the number of pieces and/or substitute some... to adapt it to your needs.

This is one of the things i liked most about openSUSE when i first started using it.

...

Our lack of derivatives can be a consequence of our current model.

when i read lack of derivatives in this sort of context i think mint, kubuntu etc. as derivatives. I think one of the strengths of our current model has also been the fact that we have stayed as one community rather then having groups of people feel they have been excluded and going off and doing there own thing. This is why i don't like the term derivative.

I would not consider Mint a derivative any longer. If most of you consider it, then the wording I chose is wrong. Kubuntu is in the process of not being a derivative either, although is way more connected to Canonical. I was thinking more about some of what you can get in Studio based on openSUSE or our Edu distro. I agree with you that these cases are examples of the failure of a project to integrate other sensibilities. It is never easy though.

...

If we add more focus to the project, if we create a very user centric release, the current model in this regard will need to adapt too.

The natural consequence of the proposed model, at least at the beginning, is that this release will be smaller, since users need less tools/software in general than developers or power users. Increasing the quality also will lead us to focus the current resources in less software. To cover more....we will need more people.

So for derivatives/spinoffs/personalized distros you will add software.

We do not have a clear idea yet on this area since we have not defined an Action Plan proposal for the Release (user centric) but the above model seems natural to me.

A general user DVD stripped of all the developer and server tools would be a great idea, it could focus on stuff lie how fast you can make Linux boot if you don't need to start a bunch of services most users don't need etc. (It should probably be the most tested DVD). I think a build aimed for servers / cloud instances would complement this well. Then we could encourage developers / power users, to do a net install and just install the patterns that they want but i think we should still at least build a one size fits all DVD similar to the current one for power users/ developers who need to set up multiple machines but don't want to go to the effort of setting up there own custom build on SUSE studio.

Though my conversations these past months with community contributors and SUSE employees from the product side the idea of a small and rock solid core where you can add packages easily to end up having your customized result (let's not called distro) in "almost installation" time is recurrent.

...

So in summary, I believe that with the proposed model we open the door for increasing these initiatives. It will be up to us (project) to define how to Govern them in a way that they add energy to the project by becoming an answer to a niche and to us (obviously to themselves too).

Initiatives that complement your project are always good news, I think.

I think as a whole this is a good initiative and that it can set openSUSE apart from others who generally just ship one DVD or split up based on window manager etc, rather then end users need.

If we are able to move into that direction, even a 5%, I think we would be able to increase our user base in a significant number.

...

Saludos

Have a good day, Simon

Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Agustin Benito Bethencourt wrote:

derivatives/spinoffs/personalized distros (Studio) are options that today are somehow based on the fact that we ship a distro with "everything" (or a lot). Then you reduce the number of pieces and/or substitute some... to adapt it to your needs.

Maybe I'm unique, but I have used susestudio in exactly the opposite way. I built an initial boot CD / appliance. I then noticed that for my use case, lots of tools were missing and were not in the OSS / Packman repos. Some were in devel / home projects on OBS. Most simply were not packaged for openSUSE. I started a packaging effort specifically to start getting more packages onto my susestudio appliance. Once they were packaged in my OBS home project I decided to push them to a devel project and then to factory. It was often only a little extra work and I got the value add of having both technical and legal reviews of my packages. The same seems to be true of some of the other susestudio appliances. Look at this one as an example http://susestudio.com/a/F78UZ4/opensuse-edu-li-f-e-12-3-64bit. Look at all the OBS repos it pulls from: Includes the following unofficial sources: ==== graphics 12.3 , GNOME:Apps , Education 12.3 , home:namtrac:subpixel 12.3 , Cinnamon 12.3 , home:cyberorg:liveextra 12.3 , Packman All 12.3 , X11:Sugar 12.3 , Vblade 12.3 No custom software packages were uploaded. ==== Note that cyberorg is the producer of the susestudio appliance and he is packaging something in his OBS home project for inclusion on the appliance. Thus my impression is that susestudio appliances are not subsets of opensuse factory / packman. Instead they are supersets and many susestudio appliance builders are in turn OBS users creating packages for their appliances. I don't know how to do it, but I very much feel that the openSUSE project fails to leverage the fact that it has 10's of thousands of advanced users building openSUSE based appliances over at susestudio. Greg -- Greg Freemyer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 04/12/2013 09:10, Joerg Stephan a écrit :

Good morning,

besides all the discussion...

I took a look at distrowatch, and how it works isnt that clear to me, so i searched a bit and found

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters

as you can see, there are two entries where openSUSE is used, (round about 12 times Ubuntu, 4 times Fedora). Such migrations to linux are really good marketing.

more if you look for suse or novell jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 04/12/2013 09:36, Joerg Stephan a écrit :

sure, but if we merge redhat and fedora, debian and ubuntu it looks worse :-)

:-) in fact it seems than the ubuntu rise is really special, challenged by no other distro. I wonder how much this costed to Mark Shuttleworth wikipedia says 10 millions de dollars, and it may be more (he spent twice thi amount to go to space :-) we have to do without this. Your summary (last post) is pretty good we have to keep working and be proud of what we do and have more fun :-) jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Am 04.12.2013 15:33, schrieb Robert Schweikert:

1.) Factory has grown tremendously and the integration burden is becoming larger. For the most part a lot of this work ends up in Stephan's lap, that's not a good situation. First there is a bus factor of 1, second we cannot expect the man to do the same thing day in and day out for the rest of his live. This is a problem that needs to be resolved.

Well, sounds like we implement a technical steering commitee

2.) With the transition from boosters to openSUSE Team the contribution areas of those paid by SUSE to work full time in the openSUSE community are changing. Rather than mopping up after everything, the team wants to do other stuff. That's fair enough every contributor, paid or unpaid has the right to contribute or not as they see fit. But this doesn't mean that the "mopping up" tasks suddenly vanish, it means that we have to figure out how to distribute the "mopping up" tasks around to more people.

Well, sounds like we implement a technical steering commitee

3.) With 12.3 and 13.1 the quality of the release has improved significantly over previous releases. The cost of this was tremendous with a large chunk of the work load carried by the openSUSE Team. There is little to no interest to continue to repeat this every 8 month at the investment level that was necessary for 12.3 and 13.1

Sounds like increasing the lifecycle. Or we reduce the "core" releases to sort of Tumbleweed and Evergreen. I guess the idea is simple, Factory is new Tumbleweed, every 24 months (or more/less) we push a release to Evergreen as our LTS.

There are other sub points within the 3 major themes outlined above and possibly a couple of other high level points can be added, but this roughly sums up the space in which we are operating. Unfortunately the noise to signal ration was unfavorable when thinsg got going.

Yup, seems so.

Later, Robert

Joerg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Am 04.12.2013 16:14, schrieb Richard Brown:

'steering' and 'doing' are 2 very different things

The specific examples you replied to were 'integration work' currently done by Stephan, and 'release work' currently done by the openSUSE Team

I would categorise both of those as 'doing', and so not the sort of thing which would make sense for a 'steering' committee, which in my mind would be only interested in 'direction' and making decisions for others to implement.

True, BUT if your conclusion is that we just add some guys who just "doing" this and "doing" that and singing and dancing the whole day, than i would say we need a committee first. Thats we are talking about for days now, we need to place structures which can respond to the current problems. Cheers -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Michal Hrusecky - 16:31 4.12.13 wrote:

Joerg Stephan - 16:22 4.12.13 wrote:

...

Am 04.12.2013 16:14, schrieb Richard Brown:

...

'steering' and 'doing' are 2 very different things

The specific examples you replied to were 'integration work' currently done by Stephan, and 'release work' currently done by the openSUSE Team

I would categorise both of those as 'doing', and so not the sort of thing which would make sense for a 'steering' committee, which in my mind would be only interested in 'direction' and making decisions for others to implement.

True, BUT if your conclusion is that we just add some guys who just "doing" this and "doing" that and singing and dancing the whole day, than i would say we need a committee first. Thats we are talking about for days now, we need to place structures which can respond to the current problems.

Well, for quite some of the stuff we just need it done. Not directions, decisions involved. But I agree that in the big picture if we want to be able to replace coolo, we would end up with need for somebody that would resolve technical conflicts in integration part - aka technical steering committee.

But anyway, most of the things can be decided and agreed upon just between people doing work, so no committee needed for most parts of the job ;-) -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Am 04.12.2013 16:57, schrieb Robert Schweikert:

Can we please use a different term, "technical steering committee" is well loaded with preconceived ideas of determining features, planning and other high level things. While coolo is doing a lot of work, including posting the release plan I would say even he would say he is not "steering" anything.

I see myself more conducting, but sometimes I end up having to awake the drums myself ;) Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi,

The problem for the release and the "new factory" model are the same. Who is willing, able, and interested to do the work? Who has the time?

These questions are the same whether one manages the release branch/process.... or whether we need people that manage the plethora of staging trees that is potentially coming our way in the "new Factory" model.

So far we are pushing the problem around to different corners of the problem space but not true solution has emerged.

A serious proposal needs to define times, effort and people. No question about it. We will reach that point soon. We just published today another piece of the puzzle, one of the last ones, openQA. Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi, I think I wrote somewhere else that we played with constrains and that, some so extensive and complex has a hard fit in mailing lists. We are in the process of taking some actions to summarize the debate and create a global picture of it. The following two weeks we will put more effort in this area. We are now concentrated in polishing the left pieces, reading the answers and discussions and participating. But yes, I agree this communication process we have followed has downsides. We knew it and we are doing our best. On Wednesday 04 December 2013 11:06:36 Robert Schweikert wrote:

On 12/04/2013 10:56 AM, Agustin Benito Bethencourt wrote:

...

Hi,

...

The problem for the release and the "new factory" model are the same. Who is willing, able, and interested to do the work? Who has the time?

These questions are the same whether one manages the release branch/process.... or whether we need people that manage the plethora of staging trees that is potentially coming our way in the "new Factory" model.

So far we are pushing the problem around to different corners of the problem space but not true solution has emerged.

A serious proposal needs to define times, effort and people. No question about it. We will reach that point soon.

We just published today another piece of the puzzle, one of the last ones, openQA.

Spoon feeding is not working all that well from my point of view, but that's a different topic.

Later, Robert

-- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi Joerg, On Wednesday 04 December 2013 17:02:57 Joerg Stephan wrote:

Am 04.12.2013 16:41, schrieb Robert Schweikert:

...

...

Am 04.12.2013 16:14, schrieb Richard Brown: Not necessarily, even if we had a "technical steering committee" and I am still not convinced that is necessary, but that's a different discussion, the steering committee could not make people appear out of

On 12/04/2013 10:22 AM, Joerg Stephan wrote: thin air that are capable and willing to do the work that is expected to be vacated.

The problem for the release and the "new factory" model are the same. Who is willing, able, and interested to do the work? Who has the time?

These questions are the same whether one manages the release branch/process.... or whether we need people that manage the plethora of staging trees that is potentially coming our way in the "new Factory" model.

So far we are pushing the problem around to different corners of the problem space but not true solution has emerged.

Yes, true and sad enough. So where is the conclusion? Whats the result, only the thread gets longer and longer.

We are in the first round, right after a proposal have been made. There will be a recap/summarizing phase and from there the picture might be way clearer. Or at least that is what I expect.

So finally (at least from my side):

1. We need more structure. If we got the problem that we have a one man "single point of failure" maybe we can easily add a second person and discuss next year that we have two persons as a "single point of failure". So in my eyes, we need structure, an instance above which sees the red line, which knows what needs to be done and mostly what is missing.

2. If we say we cant afford changes to the lifecycle, so we have a problem, but what is it? Is it our magical spell that everybody can contribute in the way he want? From all the discussion i thought we have such a huge contributor base, where does all the man power goes to?

3. So after everything i heard and wrote, we still need an higher authority, an committee, an board (called board for the rest of the mail) which holds the strings. Structuring it. Setup a roles and position page in the wiki, let a board decide where we need more man power, and let them do a "ask for help" via mailinglists and via wiki, maybe someone stands up and does it. But we must tell the people that we have an open position and tell them what they need to fill it. Given all the work of syncing and mentoring of a new guy to that single person we have identified is a really bad idea.

After all, this whole thread are only questions leading to answers leading to other questions. That doesnt solve problems. If we all think openSUSE (and maybe we should switch to OPENsuse) is great and awesome than we can drop the discussion, if we think okay, we hive some problems but it works, lets drop the threat. If all we respond to ideas saying that it does not work whithout adding new ideas to the thread, i guess we should stop the discussion now.

We have identified that we have a problem, but as it seems, 10 people and 10 problems.

...

Later, Robert

Thats it, my last 2 cent

Joerg

-- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hey, On 04.12.2013 16:22, Joerg Stephan wrote:

if your conclusion is that we just add some guys who just "doing" this and "doing" that and singing and dancing the whole day, than i would say we need a committee first.

That one you have to explain to me. We have tasks that need to be done, people do them and they are obviously happy (why else would they sing and dance?) why on earth would you need a committee? :-) Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi, On Wednesday, December 04, 2013 04:14:44 PM Richard Brown wrote:

On Wed, 2013-12-04 at 16:05 +0100, Joerg Stephan wrote:

...

Well, sounds like we implement a technical steering commitee

Well, sounds like we implement a technical steering commitee

'steering' and 'doing' are 2 very different things

The specific examples you replied to were 'integration work' currently done by Stephan, and 'release work' currently done by the openSUSE Team

Stephan ... and Tomas with the assistance of some other openSUSE Team members. 13.1 is, more than ever, a group effort. By group, I include other people outside the openSUSE Team: reviewers, sysadmins....

From champions to groups....

This is, in my opinion, the root of the 13.1 success and is also the fuel that has motivated us to make this proposal, pushing in this direction. Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org