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