Stupid subject line, couldn't find anything more striking ;)
Beware, while this mail could sound like some big rant, it's to be
understood as a wakeup call.. or rather a kick in the wasp nest ;)
So, 10.0 has been spreading widely, 10.1 is about to be released after
a very long and tedious development cycle (I guess AJ and the YaST2
developers now know what it must feel like when a woman gives birth
after 20 hours spent in a maternity room ;))
As with 10.0, the (long) period of beta and RC testing/progress has
pretty much wiped all the other topics from our focus and the
mailing-lists, especially wrt the community, and we've had a
standstill since at least 2 months.
I would like us to start a few discussions on topics that concern the
community, not just the distribution, most specifically where we are
standing today and what we need to do and get in order to be much more
in the driving seat of this whole thing, not just sitting behind the
SUSE staff at the back of the car, watching and saying "you have to do
this, you have to do that".
Let's address and discuss problems, possible solutions, initiatives,
ideas, etc... I somehow have the feeling that we've not been very
creative nor taking a lot of initiatives ourselves, as a community,
mostly just waiting for SUSE staffers to do things.
With the exception of houghi's DVD script, almost all the mails in the
past two months on the lists have been about "my soundcard doesn't
work", "Xen doesn't work", and of course "zypp/zmd problem".
While that's fine on opensuse-factory or suse-linux-e, it's not on
this list, and there hasn't been anything else, at least not as far as
I can remember.
I have a couple of rants towards the current situation, which might
only implicate my very own vision of what the openSUSE community is
supposed to be(come), but I guess others share most aspects as well.
Personally, I don't find the current situation very satisfactory.
But the idea is to discuss those issues with positive criticism, and
address them one by one. For some, we might not be able to do anything
about it, but for most, I'm convinced that we can at the very least
come up with a realistic proposal or even immediate action.
Most notably, the staff dedicated to openSUSE at Novell is too small
in numbers. This has some implications, as we cannot tell Novell what
to do with its money (no jdd, we can't):
- we have to get more in control ourselves, commit as dedicated
volunteers on as many tasks as possible
- we have to think about what we need from Novell/SUSE to do that
(e.g. admin privileges, contacts, infrastructure, documentation,
sources, whatever)
- we have to develop our own initiatives
Just a few thoughts, off the top of my head:
- packagers: we need more packagers, don't forget that the whole thing
is happening around a distribution, made of packages
- howtos and documentation: have a look at Gentoo's wiki, IMO that's a
direction we can follow (grossly), by writing wiki pages e.g. about
how to setup LAMP on SUSE Linux, an IMAP server, stuff like that
- artwork: wallpapers, web icons, banners, logos, ... access to the
SUSE logo, clarify legal rights to use them or not, ...
- web forums: yep, that one, the current non-situation is just not
satisfactory, we have to discuss it again and involve the maintainers
of current forums into the discussion, right from the start
- information flow: not enough information between different parts of
the community, also about the wiki, announcements, changes, decisions, ...
Other, minor ideas, such as having @opensuse.org email addresses, to
show we're part of the community (this has been mentioned once on the
list, but hasn't been discussed further).
(let's start individual threads about those)
We really have the opportunity of making something a lot bigger out of
all this, and it's up to *us* to do it, not to the Novell staff.
I'm sick of having unanswered questions, waiting for the build service
to solve all problems, and waiting for folks at SUSE/Novell to do
things for us because they're busy with development, beta phases or
the many other things they have to do (note: this is not meant to be a
rant against the SUSE staff, they have a lot of work and not enough
people dedicated to openSUSE).
We have to get our act together, drive topics and initiatives on this
very list ourselves, then come up with agreed upon, realistic
proposals or requests to Novell, if needed.
Of course, it's even better when we don't have to.
And let's please discuss important issues first.
This is a benevolent dictatorship model, but that doesn't mean that we
should just sit back, rant and wait for things to be done by them.
At least that's my vision on how we should evolve as a community, and
I've been using SUSE since 5.0 (= quite some time), waiting for these
opportunities to happen. Maybe I'm just too impatient, I probably am,
but I objectively think we're pretty much stuck in inertia right now.
Feedback and comments are very much appreciated :)
cheers
--
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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