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
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