On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 13:28 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
[ replying to old mail here - catching up from Thanksgiving ]
[ ... lots of accurate case studies elided ... ]
When people ask me to describe Fedora's niche, I tend to say that
we
make a prototype of something that could be a really great operating
system a year later. But we never stop and turn it into a really great
operating system: instead we introduce another dozen shiny things that
aren't quite finished yet and turn out another prototype. We never build
a Toyota Corolla, we're perpetually building motor show prototypes -
something with all sorts of shiny amazing features that isn't really
intended to work satisfactorily in the real world. We're not interested
in doing the last 20% of boring work to turn our super-exciting
prototype into something Joe Normal will drive to work every day: we
just want to keep building more super-exciting prototypes.
This kind of stuff is the reason more people don't use Fedora. If we
slowed down our pace of development and improved our documentation and
our quality standards, we would likely build something that more people
wanted to use...and we wouldn't necessarily need the three-product
proposal or the WGs to achieve that. It's something that we could
theoretically do under that new model, _or_ under our old model. It's
not really a part of the current proposals.
*but*, I'm not saying that's actually what we should do. I quite like
building exciting prototypes. Building Corollas probably ain't as much
fun. Still, there is an obvious corollary; I think it's vitally
important that in any debate which touches on this question, we bear the
above in mind. No matter how we re-arrange our deliverables or talk
about 'target audiences' and the like, as long as we maintain our
current focus on building lots of shiny new things and landing them as
soon as we possibly can and releasing often and not sweating the small
stuff, we are building prototypes, and we're not going to get a mass
user base. So I think it would be a mistake to make decisions as a part
of this process based on the idea that we're trying to make Fedora a
credible operating system for 'regular folks' *or* for 'developers' who
want a stable, reliable operating system more than they want the latest
shiny version of absolutely everything, *without* addressing the more
fundamental stuff I'm talking about above.
I think this is what the three-product WGs are all about, I'm afraid:
Getting away from continuous distraction by the next shiny thing, move
the quality threshold way up, and deliver products instead of
prototypes.