Le lundi 08 septembre 2008, à 14:44 +0200, Andreas Jaeger a écrit :
Reading Felix-Nicolai's blog post, I'd like to get your input on the following statement from him:
I believe that openSUSE is supposed to be a community based and community driven product. While many devs work for Novell and do great work, openSUSE does also depend on its many users. So they should get a hear. It is not OK to only raise this issue on a factory mailinglist - a mailinglist a regular user will never see.
* factory was setup as list for future development of the openSUSE distribution. Why is that not working? Where would you expect to have general discussion about the direction of the distribution?
I'm not sure it's not working -- it seems to be working, although not perfectly. In the KDE thread, there were certainly too many emotional replies, with no arguments, and too many people just re-stating the same thing. I don't know if this is something that we can easily "fix" -- I've certainly seen the same things in other communities... I wouldn't agree with the fact that we want feedback from all regular users on all topics. It's up to some people to either gather this feedback and report it to the list (or where it belongs) or to have the "user vision", where they clearly understand the regular point of view and can explain it to others. In a perfect world, it'd be fine to have feedback from regular users -- but we're not in a perfect world, and it would just be too much information. Just restarting what I said so people actually read it: a good way to make all this work better is to volunteer to gather feedback from users (users from the forums, from IRC, from the user mailing lists, ...). Ah, there's also the fact that Novell has some priorities with SLE that might be different than the priorities of the community. And sometimes, they might conflict. It'd be nice to have a clear way to know what we should do in this case to resolve the conflict (something like: the community wins ;-)). If we want openSUSE to succeed as a community project, that's quite important.
* openSUSE is community based and community driven - but we have Novell engineers doing engineering work with limited time and resources.
Community means not only discussion but also contribution - and I've heard many requests about KDE3 and KDE4 but so far only saw Carlos stepping up and saying "KDE3 is so important for me that I create a KDE3 LiveCD for openSUSE 11.0".
Here's my view of what the experience in the GNOME team (others might see things in a different way). What we're trying to achieve in the GNOME team is to have the development as open as possible, with most (if not all) important decisions discussed in public meetings or on the mailing list. Things that need some work (work as in code, packaging, testing, etc.) are usually advertised so people can jump in and help. And we do have some people helping. I guess other teams have a similar experience. I think that this is only getting better with time (at least, at the moment). And as other people mentioned, something like the contrib repository will help make more people understand they have the power to change openSUSE. Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org