Board SWG questions for Spins Owners
by Matt Domsch
These questions were originally posted to the Spins SIG a couple weeks
ago. At the following SIG meeting, members suggested that these
questions would be better posed to the individual spin owners, or
teams that are working on the spins, in addition to the SIG. I have
collected the mailing lists and individual spin owner names for all
spins, current or historical, and included you in this mail. As a
Fedora contributor with specific interest in using Spins as a method
to reach specific audiences or cater to specific use cases, you are
uniquely qualified to answer these questions. Your time to
thoughtfully answer is appreciated.
As you may be aware, the Fedora Project Board is trying to set a more
clear vision for what Fedora is, and should be going forward. One
aspect of this conversation is Fedora's target audience. As Spins and
Remixes specifically seek to use Fedora to reach a particular audience
or cater to specific use cases, we seek your input to help guide our
thinking.
Your responses to these questions would be appreciated. Fellow Board
member Colin Walters and I have agreed to poll the Spins and report
back to the Strategic Working Group and the Board as a whole.
Board-level Question:
Can Spins/SIGS or Fedora remixes define their own target audience?
Background
The Board has been working on defining a target audience for
Fedora. In response to this, some people feel that Fedora should allow
sub-groups to define their own target audience. Or even more strongly
that Spins/SIGs should be the only groups defining target audience; in
other words, the Board should not be defining one. An example mail
supporting this position is this mail from Toshio [1].
However, the potential conflict between a Board target audience and a
SIG target audience is still theoretical. No SIG appears to have
explicitly disagreed with the "working" target audience proposal.
Possible Solutions
1. Board sets target audience broadly, spins tailor to a subset
thereof.
2. Board sets target audience broadly, spins tailor to either a
subset thereof, or to additional audiences outside that scope so
long as there are no conflicts.
3. Board does not set target audience, leaves it to each Spin to
set their specific target audience.
1. requires spins to be much more than consumers of Fedora
content.
2. audience of some spins may overlap. That's OK.
3. audience of some spins may technically conflict. How to
resolve conflicts? Spins -> FESCo -> Board.
As members contributing to Spins, how do you view the above, and how
would you like to see Spins interact with the larger Project with
respect to defining target audiences?
Board-level Question:
Can Spins/SIGS or Fedora remixes change the code enough to meet their
goals?
Background
In the present situation, Spins must take all of their content from
the official Fedora repositories. Remixes may take content from
wherever, and modify as they see fit, but may not use the primary
Fedora trademarks.
Questions for Spins and the Spins SIG
Given the present situation:
1. Has any Spin found the present situation unduly restrictive?
1. If so, how specifically?
2. Has any Spin found they cannot address their target audience
properly?
1. If so, in what way?
2. Is the root problem that all packages must be in the
official repositories?
3. How are you addressing this today?
4. How would you like to address this in the future?
5. Are the resources you would need readily available?
1. If not, what would you need to properly address this?
6. Is the transition from "Spin" to "Remix" onerous?
1. If so, what can be done to make it less so?
[1] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/2009-October/0074...
Thanks,
Matt & Colin
13 years, 1 month
Re: Fedora Linux Format software review: January 2010
by Hans de Goede
Hi,
On 12/29/2009 11:20 PM, Christopher Brown wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Linux Format is a popular magazine in the U.K but which ships all over
> the world. It regularly reviews interesting bits of software and I
> thought:
>
> a) It would be interesting to see how much of what they review is
> included in Fedora
> b) It would be a good idea to get that which is not in and/or up to date
> c) If there is enough interest I would like to form a SIG to do the
> monthly reviews - a kind of packaging wishlist on steroids perhaps :)
>
> I blogged about this recently and you can read the basic idea there:
>
> http://chruz.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/ive-got-the-music-on-my-radio/
>
> The editor has expressed his willingness to send details of software
> which they will review to us so we have a head start. I have conducted
> the first review of the January 2010 issue which you can read here:
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LinuxFormatPackaging
>
> There are some interesting omissions, for example Recoll, the desktop
> search tool which came out ahead of Beagle and Google Desktop and
> which doesn't even have a review request opened for it yet.
>
> A few points that need mentioning:
>
> 1) I do not and have never worked for Linux Format nor has anyone I know :)
> 2) There may be some glaring errors - this is why this is on the wiki
> so please feel free to update/change etc. For example I have not
> undertaken rigorous reviews for the software's suitability.
> 3) This is not intended as anything other than a distillation of what
> would be good to have in the repositories.
>
> I welcome your comments as ever.
>
blob and conquer is no longer in Fedora (and not being updated), because
it contains various non free resources. I'm working together with the
Debian packager on replacement textures, sound and music, as time allows,
until this is fixed it cannot be included in Fedora.
I've been discussing doing a "development sprint" focussing solely on
resource replacement together with the debian packager, as we are both
Dutch the idea was to get together and work an entire day on this, hopefully
making some good progress.
It would be nice if others could join in (be it virtual not necessarily
physically). So are there any takers for this ?
Regards,
Hans
13 years, 1 month
alienarena removed from games spin for F13 due to size
by Bruno Wolff III
With the increased size of the desktop spin (upon which games is based) and
I think some game data sets getting a bit bigger it was going to be hard to
get the games spin down to size by cutting out desktop stuff. Instead for
this release I cut one of the largest games, alienarena, from the spin.
While the game will be missed, this seemed to be the best course for F13.
For F14 things look very good for getting back 10% of the games spin size
(about 400 MB) using lzma for compressing spins. That should allow me to
get alienarena back in again, barring significant increases in the size
of other games or the desktop spin.
13 years, 1 month