Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-kde (245 mails)

[Andrew Wafaa <awafaa@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2010-03-25 at 09:03 +0100, Martin Schlander wrote:
> I'm not sure exactly what kind of answers you're looking for. But here are 
> some stray thoughts of mine about the state of the geeko nation.

I'm not necessarily looking for answers, but some guidance never
hurts :-)  Airing your thoughts is ideal and pretty much gets the ball
rolling - thanks.

> The main thing we're missing is a clear goal and direction. Wanting to be 
> "the 
> best community distro available" is too vague and can mean a ton of different 
> things to different people. As a comparison I think Ubuntu and Fedora have 
> goals and identities that are operational and that it's pretty clear to most 
> people what they are and what they want to do.

So what you're saying is we need both long-term *and* short term goals
that are realistic and achievable?  That makes perfect sense, and I
whole heartily agree.  As long as we don't fix the direction or targets
too much in stone then it shouldn't be a problem to achieve; I think one
thing we as a community need to do better is be more agile.  Any chance
of examples from Ubuntu & Fedora just so that I (and maybe others) can
see what you mean, please?

> In terms of infrastructure, I think we're more likely to have too much of it 
> than missing anything. Though I sometimes miss a good and easy way to get an 
> overview of who maintains (or doesn't maintain) what packages, what jobs 
> currently need to be done,  and good handling of package requests.

Are you saying we have too many tools?  Or is it the fact the tools are
disparate and don't "blend"?  In my opinion I'm not so sure we have too
many, but that we don't really know how to use what we have - I'm guilty
of that lack of knowledge.

> In terms of software I think the main things holding the distro back are:
> * broken ATi repo (guess we're defenseless here)

Unfortunately we are pretty powerless when it comes to the proprietary
drivers, and the open equivalents have way too much political baggage to
make things simple.  Saying that, hopefully we can work as a community
and even potentially work with both upstream and fellow distros to sort
things out - maybe that's what it takes to get the "sponsors" to
actually start listening.

> * updater applet (used by ~99% of users almost daily for important tasks, but 
> is sooo not working smooth, and obviously not a priority)

If it is deemed of high enough importance by the community, then we have
to get the priority raised so that we can get things fixed.  We need to
engage those that are able to fix it, get a dialogue going and explain
clearly what is wrong and why it is so important.  It may seem obvious
to you and some others, but sometimes developers work in weird and
mysterious ways.  A little nudge can often work wonders.

> * yast and zypper hiding vendor change update availability from non-experts

I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that an explanation to
this issue had been made.  If there hasn't been one then we can always
ask for one.  We may not like the reasoning, but as long as the
reasoning is sound and explained clearly it is one of those things.

> Other than that I think we're in good shape. Just need to keep working and 
> continually do decent releases, and we should return to former strength and 
> more - if we can avoid more PR disasters and disastrous releases (10.1/ZMD, 
> 11.0/KDE4.0, 11.1/11-months-of-death-by-a-thousand-bugs).

Indeed, there is no room for relaxing.  At least not yet, maybe we can
kick back on the beach with a cool drink once we have conquered the
world :-D

Thanks for you're input, I and hopefully others appreciate it.

Regards,

Andy

-- 
Andrew Wafaa, openSUSE Member: FunkyPenguin.
PGP: 0x3A36312F
openSUSE: Get It, Discover It, Create It at http://www.opensuse.org