On 12/02/2013 03:38 AM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
On Saturday 30 November 2013 23:46:37 Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:
Am 30.11.2013 22:22, schrieb Robert Schweikert:
I would like openSUSE to stay relevant. For example relevant to stay (or get) supported from third party (yes, even closed source) software vendors.
This is extremely difficult.SUSE has a whole team dedicated to get support for SLES from ISVs. Every time an ISVs states supprt for a distribution it costs the ISV a large chunk of money. I am not certain that we can pedal fast and hard enough to make it worth the while of an ISV to state support for openSUSE. There is not necessarily a direct correlation to relevance.
hmm, some examples I have in mind: SpiderOak Spotify Crossover Office
That's not the sort of ISV you are used to probably but none of them has packages for openSUSE but they have for Fedora and Ubuntu at least. And there are probably many more similar to those. And yes I'm pretty sure that the size of the user base is relevant to get their attention.
As we're about 2-3 times larger than Fedora, the size of the userbase seems not to be the reason - or we advertise our user base not very well.
I think it is more of a perception and mindshare thing than a hard numbers issue, see my response to this.
And I think it is that: we are not good at marketing and it has gotten much worse over the last year.
I would really prefer someone to be able to make technical decisions if needed. The status quo seems to be that coolo is the one because someone needs to keep Factory working. So we will always need someone to decide and even when I basically trust coolo I think this is not the right approach.
Well, coolo is not the only one making the decisions. We do have a process of getting stuff into factory. This is mostly being followed I think. The process includes publicly proclaiming the intentions of getting a package into factory. When this happens everyone has the opportunity to pipe up and state their case why a given package should or should not be in factory. Not responding as is the case in most cases is also a decision and indicates that people are OK with the submission.
The process is only for new additions to Factory. I'm thinking more about changes done to components already in openSUSE. I'm not aware there is a process (and I couldn't imagine a process for it anyway).
How about we adopt the type of process being used by Debian, Python, Gentoo and others. Example: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0001/
While you can probably convince me that the systemd transition would have most likely benefited from a "formal process" (change process/procedure) I do not think we have enough of those to require such a process. Secondly, while defined processes are nice in certain aspects they are also a hindrance in other ways and quickly start to feel constraining. Thus there should be another way that allows us to handle things like systemd better without having people that want to make changes write up a proposal. If you have a process then the next problem you'll have is to decide when to follow the process and when not. A change like systemd yes, what about the change from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3? Is it worth writing a proposal when there is no choice? This very quickly goes down a rabbit hole. Anyway, It is probably worth a separate discussion at a later time. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org