All in all, seems like a good proposal, but a couple of comments that immediately come to mind for me are below: On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:00:55 +0200, Pavol Rusnak wrote:
The openSUSE distribution acts as a reference distribution, providing an environment for testing the used technology, a stabilizing ground for common components, and a real-life use case for applying technology and distributing Linux software. It's targeted at technically interested users, including programmers and system administrators. It has a focus on good user experience and making technology available to end users. It doesn't target users with highly specific technical needs.
To me, "good user experience" isn't very specific, and in some ways might come across as contradicting the "no focus" area of "non-technical users" - not that technical users can't have a good user experience, but that there's an implication of 'polish' that's more associated with a non- technical audience. I hope that makes sense, because it seems at the moment to not be easy to explain what I mean.
== Activities ==
= Essentials = [...] * Broad hardware support of components and platforms
I agree with the comments Andreas and Cornelius made with regards to other architectures. It might be good to spell that out a bit more clearly that contributions for non-x86/x86_64 platforms (and whatever else is considered "standard") are welcome but not guaranteed to be provided (or something to that effect).
= Good to have = [...] * Community for user support
I would consider this essential. Without a community for user support, there's no feedback mechanism to improve the reference distribution. It also seems odd to not have this listed as "essential" since providing the home for the community is considered essential. Put another way, if having a user support community isn't essential, then why invest the time and resources in providing the home for that community (not that I think providing the home isn't essential - I provide the counterexample to demonstrate this point only).
= No focus =
* Directly providing a polished distribution for non-technical end users
I think we do this now with the main distribution, and that to an extent, this is an essential goal as well (or at least "good to have") because it provides a basis for the derivatives to provide that polish. I guess this perhaps needs to be more specifically defined for me as to what isn't/wouldn't be included. I couldn't even say what I would take as implied as not being provided by this statement.
* Bleeding edge technology
With the pace of OSS development, what's considered bleeding edge today may not be in a month. It might be helpful to have some examples presented in this discussion to help clarify what might not be included and how a determination would be made as to when something was no longer considered "bleeding edge" and would be considered for inclusion. Of course, I'm thinking in terms a a general guideline, not a hard and fast rule, because obviously everything's going to be a little different. For example, some things that may have been included in the past that might be considered bleeding edge are things like ext4, btrfs, the original updater that evolved from red-carpet (the first one that was implemented in Mono back in the 10.x days - back when the resolver spiked CPU utilization for extended periods of time for many users), beagle, and even KDE4 (not in its current state, but when it was added to 11.2). Those technologies might at their inclusion have been considered "technology previews". Most of these technologies are no longer considered bleeding edge by the majority of users (btrfs might be the only exception to that). I mention them not to "open old wounds" but as examples where the project has included technologies in a release that may have been considered bleeding edge at the time. I'm not making any judgments here about the technologies themselves - but part of the issue I have with this statement is that 'bleeding edge' in and of itself can be in the eye of the beholder. For example, while some users may consider KDE4 at the 11.2 release to have been bleeding edge, it's very possible that the dev team didn't consider it to be because they'd been using it regularly - in other words, it's can be a matter of perspective, and the perspective used to apply this label needs to be defined in order for the statement to have any real meaning. It might make more sense instead of saying there's no focus on bleeding edge technology to clearly mark anything that's a technology preview as such and include it with those caveats. That way, that newer technology can be tested by those who want to do so, but they know that they are essentially alpha- or beta- testing. (Of course, it could be argued that those who do that should be using Factory instead of a numbered release - and perhaps it will be.) Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org