Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-kde (245 mails)

[Martin Schlander <martin.schlander@xxxxxxxxx>]

Torsdag den 25. marts 2010 23:33:07 skrev Andrew Wafaa:
> On Thu, 2010-03-25 at 09:03 +0100, Martin Schlander wrote:
> > 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?

I mean we need one main, long term goal and purpose, that can be summed up in 
a single sentence - which is operational enough to guide technical priorities 
and decision making, as well as focus marketing.

Ubuntu have their bug #1 - breaking MS dominance. Wanting to be the "Linux for 
hobbits".

Fedora is all about bleeding edge and free software.

What is openSUSE about? Some say it's bleeding edge for geeks and testbed for 
SLE... some say it's quite stable and user friendly... some say it's for 
experts... some say it's professional and polished. But it can't be all those 
things at the same time, and the result is we have people pulling in different 
directions cuz there's no real agreement on what openSUSE should and shouldn't 
be.

Personally I'd like to see openSUSE as "the professional and productive 
GNU/Linux for home users" - I think we're in a good position to do that, but 
there are definitely forces pulling in different directions.

 
> > 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.

I'm not sure e.g. why we need lizards in addition to planetsuse, or how much 
value users.o.o/connect ads, also how many different version control systems 
hold openSUSE related stuff now, berlios, gitorious, forgesvn, others? I think 
our infrastructure could be leaner - making things easier for new contributors 
and for the admins.

 
> > * 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.  

The thing is the community won't deem it important. Cuz any active community 
member knows enough to use zypper or yast to install some patches. But if 
openSUSE is supposed to be succesful beyond a few geeks and enthusiasts, the 
updater applet is very important. I can hardly go to a lug meeting or a forum 
without people complaining about it to me - and I can't blame them I must say.

> > * 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. 

Explanations only help the handful of geeks and enthusiasts that listen - and 
it doesn't change the fact that too much work and knowledge is required to 
perform vendor change updates for single packages. I haven't checked the state 
in factory/11.3 yet though - maybe it has been improved sufficiently already.
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