From my perspective exploring Linux over the past couple of years it has been this "last mile" of communication that has been downfall of
The participation link still doesn't answer where decisions regarding
the future of OpenSuse are made and how people can influence their
outcome.
I realize there are probably private mailing lists and such where
overall decisions on feature sets are made and goals are set, and they
don't need the needless pestering of people who aren't actively
involved in the project, but some insight into this process would go a
long way.
the community-based distribution model. I realize that if I download
the latest development builds, hang out on IRC, monitor the
development mailings lists and such I'll have some idea on where
OpenSuse is headed with new releases, even if I'm still not sure what
I can do to change it. But if I'm someone who's just using 10.0
everyday, who files bug reports and answers questions in forums, I
really don't have any idea on potential big changes until they are
more or less done.
This IMHO is the challenge for distributions is to actually build a
true community and not be so top down/insular as to exclude anyone
who's not completely involved in development. This is why people
change distributions so much, is because major changes like spatial
nautilus just show up in a new build and there's not much the average
user can do to keep it from happening or even know it's coming.
Thanks,
Sander
On 10/16/05, Christoph Thiel
On Sun, 16 Oct 2005, Alexander Antoniades wrote:
I do think that this is the problem with communication in many open source projects is that we think that signing up for a users mailing list will give us some insight and say in future releases, whereas it seems to be more of a first level support situation. Some of what this thread is talking about goes beyond offering patches and bug reports and more into the general direction of the project. For example "please don't make OpenSuse yet-another-gtk-centric distribution" isn't exactly a bug report/patch situation. How does someone who's not a developer or Novell employee get involved in the openness you discuss, and find out what's being planned for upcoming releases?
There are many ways to get involved... I'd recommend you to read [1] first. Running the latests development version that's available on openSUSE.org would be another way to find out where the develment is happening. If you want to suggest new features or packages, the wishlists on the wiki would be the place to go...
Regards Christoph
[1] http://www.opensuse.org/How_to_participate
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