On 11/01/2010 05:14 PM, Karsten Wade wrote:
On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 09:00:41AM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
We can encourage Fedora Remixes to list themselves on a wiki page, but I
do not think we need to require this. I do not think it is in the
interest of anyone to make it any more difficult for someone to make a
derivative work or remix of Fedora.
I could see a web application that made it easy for remixers to
provide all sorts of information about what, where, how, why, who,
when, and so forth.  Even more, I could see an active special interest
group in Fedora that attracted remixers by giving them reasons to be
involved.  A sort-of meta-community of remixers, who themselves might
be the tip of many thousands of remix users.

We have had http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DerivedDistributions which is not working out that well I would say.
Perhaps as you suggest a stand alone web application would work better than the wiki but I still fear that it stays the same since there is no motivating factor or direct requirements for them to provide that information to us thus it would not be maintained any better then a simple wiki page.

If you think about it they already get what they need from us why would they contribute anything back if they dont have to?

I personally see nothing wrong in having them register those remixes with us for measurements and research purposes at least we would be getting something back from them that way instead of those remixes just remaining unknown entity out there without us knowing of their existence nor if they are actually contributing anything back to the project or directly upstream for that matter ( upstream being other than Fedora in that term ).

Regarding Remix SIG I think it would be better to strengthen the already existing Spin SIG rather then creating a new one...

The concern is, anything that is automatic without opt-in is going to
need a HUGE amount of visibility to the Fedora community.  People are
wary of being tracked and reported on, so they would have to know
early what was being tracked, why, how, how it was aggregated,
anonymized, and so forth.  All of that decided, openly, before a
single line of code need be written.

Certainly.

Smolt was created originally as a response to a situation where we
weren't going to go through that last paragraph of hassle with the
Fedora community.  Could the data needs you are talking about utilize
the existing Smolt + grow a remixer community?

Comparing what's present on smolt with what's mentioned on distrowatch then we only got a handful of potential derivatives that are being reported and there are only 3 that are present in smolt, on distrowatch and on our wiki page at the same time ( Ojuba, Mythdora and Linpus ).

Without knowing what these remixes are how are we going to be able to tell good remixes from potentially bad ones?

As an example smolt is reporting 25 people using Fedora release 15 ( Finian ).  What we know is that Fedora 15 is in development and is referred by us and smolt as rawhide and certainly has not been officially released yet.

Finian is not one of the names that got suggested for Fedora release 15 names. ( That name should be announced today given that the voting ended at midnight ).

So is Fedora release 15 ( Finian ) a cracked version of Fedora that some 25 unsuspecting users are using thinking that it is the latest and greatest from Fedora or is it simply Rawhide remixed in Finnish?

JBG