Am Sonntag, den 28.06.2009, 15:21 +0200 schrieb Kevin Kofler:
"Core desktop infrastructure" like flickerfree boot which
is <SARCASM>surely
worlds more useful and important to people</SARCASM> than a desktop globe
with OpenStreetMap integration providing Free as in Speech street-level
maps and place search, among other nice features?
I use Marble a lot. Whereas doing away with a flicker at boot time is not
going to radically change my life.
What are you using if not Marble? Dead-tree maps? Some proprietary web
service? (Are you aware of the strict copyright and even usage restrictions
on those proprietary map services?) Sure you can use the
openstreetmap.org
website, but a desktop app like Marble is a nicer user interface, and it
also has other features than just being a client for OSM.
> Moreover all the features I mention were driven within Fedora.
And how is this relevant to the user? The user cares about what features
they're getting, not who has written the code for them.
> KDE does lack integration with them.
Okay, first of all, Marble has nothing to
do with the discussion and to
be fair let Viking be mentioned, which is a bit harder to use but surely
works.
Then to the point of Fedora-specific features:
It is true, that almost every feature on the feature page of a new
release gets integrated into the Gnome desktop first, the other desktops
sometimes get them one release later (or not at all).
Let's take the language changer as example. When I change the desktops
language via system-config-language and log in again, it offers me to
rename my folders.
That is exclusively restricted to Gnome, but is surely useful and could
be counted as "Core desktop infrastructure".
So the question is:
Where do we draw the line?
Do we draw the line by the ressources we have available to develop it?
Or do we draw the line by user's needs, even if some people who only use
Gnome anyway have to write a little hack for XFCE too?
That is surely a political question, because we can't force people to
implement their "features" for every desktop (we can't force them to do
anything at all), besides from creating a policy that "Fedora features"
have to work on every desktop (as long as they are GUI-related) if they
want to be included in the release. So, do we want that, or do we want
to continue like we did before?
Apart from that, I agree that _someone_ has to change the download page
_some day_. I don't wanna do that (I even couldn't), does anyone here?