* Stephan Kulow
Am 10.06.2015 um 17:04 schrieb Guido Berhoerster:
Changing that balance of hardware support, coverage of packages, recent version and stability means also potentially exchanging or losing parts of our base of users and contributors.
Yes. I won't deny it.
And changing that balance means also potentially adding to our base of users and contributors.
It seems that every year we have to have this same discussion of fundamentally changing our development model, target users and goals of openSUSE under which the current community operates. I would rather appreciate a discussion of how we can address the actual underlying problems.
I can't say which is more likely - all I know is that we tried long enough with the current model to know that it has no bright future.
I disagree with that, we just changed the development model of Factory a year ago and we have not had a stable release come out of that development model. Due to the greater exposure of Factory/Tumbleweed had I would expect a much higher quality at release time compared to the previous couple of releases. A new development model and target audience might be something exciting to market but after the first releases that effect will eventually wane and we'll be back to where we are now in terms of marketing. It may attract new users who e.g. want to run openSUSE on their servers or build an applicance on top of it, but it will also drive off other users and contributors. Even a net gain in users does not necessarily translate into a net gain of contributors. If you take the Evergreen project as an indicator, despite its success and the interest that is visible from the mailinglist it hasn't had a great influx of new contributors and is still run by the same two or three people that started it.
All I can ask you is give the new model a chance - there are still many variables you can influence if you tried. I actually wished more people would go ahead and stretch ways to solve the issues they see with the rules I gave instead of saying NO.
I did not simply say "no", but I'm also not sold to the idea and I do have some concerns and questions with the outlined plan which would greatly diminish the utility of openSUSE releases for me (and from what I've seen some other contributors as well) and haven't found it reassuring how some of these questions were simply shrugged off (not by you but others in the initial thread you started). If we commit to the model you laid out without addressing these issues now, I fear there will be no turning back later without much additional cost and friction. In particular, because apart from the missing packages these issues will only become visible and problematic after some time over the lifetime of SLE12. I'd be much more able to embrace and participate in the effort if there was some reassurement and commitment by SUSE to provide manpower to either enable, maintain and backport drivers for consumer-level hardware even without a business case for SLE or to support a separate openSUSE kernel for each release as it currently done. Furthermore, I see no reason why it should not be a requirement to include all packages from Factory which are *not yet in openSUSE:42. After all that is the deal we have now, if you submit stuff to Factory you commit to maintain it in a release. It doesn't have to happen all at once but should be a goal before a stable release. Based on my own observations and after watching the recording of the OSC community meeting - there seems an abundance of contributors maintaining high-level packages - but a shortage of contributors taking care of complex and low-level components such as the kernel, systemd etc. - there is a lack of manpower for - release engineering, - infrastructure maintenance, - documentation (particularly the wiki), - advocacy and marketing The above issues seem to be very much a consequence of how openSUSE has grown, it has become open to outsiders but it is not fully owned by the community. A lot of shortage is in areas which used to be taken care of by SUSE but from which it has withdrawn without non-SUSE community members stepping in, particularly in areas which require a high level of skills but offer little rewards. So I think it's unrealistic to expect new people stepping in and helping with these complex tasks, at least not in the short term. Without marketing and advocay we can offer the best technology (and I think we already do offer great technology and have a very low barrier of entry) and will still remain in an obscure corner. I don't know how to change that, it's a complex, not purely technical problem so it demans a complex answer and would prefer a discussion about that or we will be back next year with the same discussion of moving things around again. -- Guido Berhoerster -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org