Hi all,
I am the maintainer of the Fedora Scientific Spin [1,2]. Only this morning, a colleague brought my attention to the Fedora Plasma product. Just glancing through the PRD [3], I can see quite a bit of overlap in the objectives and audience of both.
Should I just go and carefully read the discussions on the Fedora products and spins and what roles they are going to play in the future or is there a way these two efforts can collaborate?
[1] http://spins.fedoraproject.org/scientific-kde/ [2] http://fedora-scientific.readthedocs.org/ [3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Plasma_Product/PRD
Thanks, -Amit.
Amit Saha wrote:
I am the maintainer of the Fedora Scientific Spin [1,2]. Only this morning, a colleague brought my attention to the Fedora Plasma product. Just glancing through the PRD [3], I can see quite a bit of overlap in the objectives and audience of both.
Off-topic, but have you considered adding Veusz to the spin? (I'm upsteam/fedora maintainer).
Jeremy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeremy Sanders" jeremy@jeremysanders.net To: kde@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2014 5:25:00 PM Subject: Re: Fedora plasma and Fedora scientific
Amit Saha wrote:
I am the maintainer of the Fedora Scientific Spin [1,2]. Only this morning, a colleague brought my attention to the Fedora Plasma product. Just glancing through the PRD [3], I can see quite a bit of overlap in the objectives and audience of both.
Off-topic, but have you considered adding Veusz to the spin? (I'm upsteam/fedora maintainer).
Thanks. I hadn't heard of it before. I will look at getting it added to the kickstart.
Amit Saha wrote:
I am the maintainer of the Fedora Scientific Spin [1,2]. Only this morning, a colleague brought my attention to the Fedora Plasma product. Just glancing through the PRD [3], I can see quite a bit of overlap in the objectives and audience of both.
We are still discussing whether we want to move forward with the Plasma Product as currently proposed in the first place.
The current proposal is something in the middle between the current KDE spin and the current Scientific spin, and IMHO it would be a poor replacement for at least one of them, if not for both. I'd expect a scientific Product to ship scientific applications ON the live image, but that makes the image huge and much less interesting for other user groups. I'm a scientist myself, but I don't think forcing our scientific applications on all KDE users by default is going to fly (but neither is NOT shipping those applications on a Product which claims to be science-oriented going to fly).
Another issue is, what if somebody comes up with a great new scientific application that is not KDE-based? Would we still want to feature that application? (From a science standpoint, we would, from a KDE standpoint, probably not.) Right now, all the flagship applications I can think of happen to be KDE- or Qt-based (kdeedu apps, Kile, LyX etc.; if we also target educational applications for young children, there's also GCompris that is being ported to Qt), but that could change. You already ship (or used to ship) some non-KDE stuff like Eclipse (whose relevance to science eludes me, to be honest) on your Scientific spin.
The proposal in its current state mainly came up as a compromise attempt because several FESCo and Board members are opposed to another workstation- focused Product and thus want to see a different target user base, but they are still not happy with the proposal as it stands now, and IMHO we already compromised too much.
Kevin Kofler
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Kofler" kevin.kofler@chello.at To: kde@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2014 3:47:01 AM Subject: Re: Fedora plasma and Fedora scientific
Amit Saha wrote:
I am the maintainer of the Fedora Scientific Spin [1,2]. Only this morning, a colleague brought my attention to the Fedora Plasma product. Just glancing through the PRD [3], I can see quite a bit of overlap in the objectives and audience of both.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. My comments inline.
We are still discussing whether we want to move forward with the Plasma Product as currently proposed in the first place.
The current proposal is something in the middle between the current KDE spin and the current Scientific spin, and IMHO it would be a poor replacement for at least one of them, if not for both. I'd expect a scientific Product to ship scientific applications ON the live image, but that makes the image huge and much less interesting for other user groups. I'm a scientist myself, but I don't think forcing our scientific applications on all KDE users by default is going to fly (but neither is NOT shipping those applications on a Product which claims to be science-oriented going to fly).
Completely agree with that one.
Another issue is, what if somebody comes up with a great new scientific application that is not KDE-based? Would we still want to feature that application? (From a science standpoint, we would, from a KDE standpoint, probably not.) Right now, all the flagship applications I can think of happen to be KDE- or Qt-based (kdeedu apps, Kile, LyX etc.; if we also target educational applications for young children, there's also GCompris that is being ported to Qt), but that could change. You already ship (or used to ship) some non-KDE stuff like Eclipse (whose relevance to science eludes me, to be honest) on your Scientific spin.
That's a great point. The reason Fedora Scientific is KDE based is not because applications like Kile and others are Qt or KDE based. It just turned out that *I* happened to be a newly converted KDE user when I was first initiating the work on the spin. And there were not much of a feedback *against* KDE, so that's how it has been. If there is an application which requires me to pull in non-KDE stuff, I definitely will include it, like I already do. Besides Eclipse [1], I think there is some other application which pulls in some GTK libraries as well. So, that way Fedora Scientific is kept aloof from being strict about not shipping software because it's not Qt based.
[1] The reason for having Eclipse is so that programmers more comfortable with using an IDE already find it installed. You have a point regarding it's relevance to Science and it doesn't probably have a place on the Spin, but well..
The proposal in its current state mainly came up as a compromise attempt because several FESCo and Board members are opposed to another workstation- focused Product and thus want to see a different target user base, but they are still not happy with the proposal as it stands now, and IMHO we already compromised too much.
I see, well, ok thanks for the update. I will keep an eye on future discussions.
-
Amit Saha -
Jeremy Sanders -
Kevin Kofler