Hi, On 12/07/2012 07:21 AM, Raymond Wooninck wrote:
On Friday 07 December 2012 11:42:23 Richard Brown wrote:
Do we need to define targets for our distribution or that is a role for deployers and third parties? In terms of actual development goals (eg. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Goals_12.3) I think that's a place for our contributors to decide and the board to keep their noses out of
And who will represent those openSUSE users that are not contributors and not even Community members ? Wasn't this the reason why FATE was implemented ? As a platform where openSUSE users could request changes for their favorite distribution ?
Yes, but as a project we are driven by volunteer contributions and just because users put stuff into openFATE and vote it to the top of the list doesn't mean it will get implemented. In the end, those who do the work have the power over what gets implemented and goes into the distro. We as a community are not in a position to direct developers/packagers/maintainers to work on something that may not be interesting to them and do the work just because users voted for a given feature in openFATE. This does not mean we should ignore what is in openFATE and maybe this is an area where the board can keep an eye on openFate and if something is not getting picked up the board can send out a call for volunteers. But that would be about the extend of it. On the other hand this may also be a great area for the openSUSE team at SUSE to jump right into the fray. Augustine does have the power to direct the team members to work on specific tasks that may lie outside a given team member's "scratch your itch" zone.
I agree that the board should not drive the actual development goals, however it should ensure the process itself. The current situation is that the contributor is making the call whether or not a change is implemented. I can take my own contribution as an example. Plymouth was an openFATE request, but despite several attempts nobody really picked it up. Together with some other community members, I managed to integrate it within the openSUSE boot process and submitted it to Factory. At that moment only me and the Release Manager decided to make Plymouth the default bootsplash and drop our old bootsplash. Where was the input from the community ? Let alone the input from our userbase.
Well, I think there was input in that the item was in openFATE for a while. Thus, the input was there. However, the final decision rests with those that do the work. Those that do the work get by default the most say. Those that do not pitch in can certainly provide input and make there voices heard, and they should. However, it is up to those doing the work to decide about how much of the input from non contributors they will consider. This reminds me a lot of the systemd arguments we had on the -factory and other lists. To this day there have been many that complain about systemd and argued in favor of keeping SysV-init. Yet non of those that complained has stepped up to the plate to maintain the SysV-init system for the distribution in the years to come. Anyway, please lets not derail the discussion and get on the systemd tangent. I just mention it as an example in recent memory, there are other examples ;) .
If we look around us, then we see that a majority of the users of linux distributions are talking about the fact that a small group of people are making decisions for them. We all know about these discussions and I feel strongly that we as the openSUSE distribution should prevent this kind of talk about us.
That is a noble goal. However, I am uncertain about the achievability of the goal. In the end those with the fingers in the code make the decisions and that by definition are the package maintainers and those are few compared to the user base. I think by the time we are done pruning our lists and collecting statistics about our packages we will find that many packages have only one or two maintainers and therefore there are only 1 or 2 people making decisions about the direction of any given package. This is not to say that there are not opportunities for us to address the feeling of "helplessness" in the user community. As Richard pointed out, from the distro point of view and from a developer point of view we need to do a better job in communicating decisions and why they were made. While this communication will not take away the fact that few decide, it will make it much easier for those that are not part of decision process to follow along and support the decision, thus alleviating the feeling of being "run over by a train". Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead 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