Last month the Fedora community met for a three day summit to discuss future plans and approaches for Fedora. One result is that there is now a new position available within the community, Fedora Infrastructure Leader. I analyzed the IRC log for all three days and took some notes on things I thought were particularly relevant to the state of Fedora as a community and top-line Linux distribution as well as Red Hat (Fedora's unofficial "step parent"). Since IRC logs can be a handful to read at times, I thought it might be useful to post my notes for review. I'll most likely follow this post with a strategic breakdown of potential approaches and solutions.
NOTE - Personal commentary is highlighted in italics:
- "...we've been talking about a world in which anyone can contribute to Core, or 'opening Core' or whatever, and anyone can participate. That's what we're trying to get to."
- KDE is an example "why open core" answer
- By opening up Fedora becomes "...a community distribution, run in a community way."
- Openness "removes roadblocks to community contribution."
- An open approach enables the inclusion of a larger pool of supported software "When Red Hat *maybe* cares about 500 packages at a time, max."
- Looking to help raise the profile of Fedora, especially from under the "Red Hat lite" label
- "Lowering the roadblocks to contribution makes Fedora an actual meritocracy."
- Reasons for opening Fedora:
- "A bigger tent. More people involved means a better distro."
- "Allows for Fedora use cases that we don't envision: innovation happens at the edges."
- "Makes it easier to build downstream distros -- which people are already doing, so we can at least make it easier. (RHEL, OLPC, PS3, etc.)"
- "Making it easier for the downstream community to commit their interesting changes back to us (Fedora)."
- Separation of Core and Extras: What constitutes Fedora and what are add-ons
- Extras shouldn't cause code freezes.
- The core and extras must converge for releases...no need for divergent dependencies
- Replacement of CVS...CVS = quicksand
- Lack of evangelism, people need to be able to find out about Fedora the same way they can with Firefox.
- Create bigger roles for Fedora Advocates.
- Issues to be solved for opening Fedora:
- Build Infrastructure for both packages and distro.
- Source Infrastructure
- Release methodology
- Architectures
- Q&A Testing
- Project Housing
- IS/IT/Infrastructure
- I18N (Internationalization) issues
- Fedora Platform (Fedora Standard Base)
- Platforms as a definition of release point(s).
- Platform roadmaps
- Platforms as a promise to the community
- Promise of what components will be in a release
- "Platform matters because you need a stable base to build upon."
- Platform: All packages for which we will announce version at release time.
- Fedora Standard Base is a subset of the "Fedora Platform"
- Build management systems, patching, version control, etc.
- PPC, sparc, ia64 work
- On Demand ISO's...pre-configured, vertically focused Fedora disks.
- Web 2.0 type interface through which ISO's are customized and later delivered as a ready made link to a URL for download. More concept at the moment...might be feasible later down the line.
- Fedora Governance of the Fedora Universe
- Documentation: may not be glamorous but it really helps an open source project go round.
- Resource scarcity problem: what to work on and what to leave to the engineers "upstream at Red Hat." A balance must be struck between what benefits Fedora and what directly helps Red Hat.
- Points system representative of community respect/cred: This needs to be put into place within every major open source community across the globe. Most online forums already include some sort of peer/community based points system.
- mp3, video codecs, drivers, wireless: formalizing default support for this big four is a big hurdle that has to be crossed at some point.
- Legal distribution of Fluendo mp3.
- How to proceed with LiveCD, related strategy plus purpose clarification.
- Shaping LiveCD to serve as a type of baseline/point release alongside the tools which enable the community to build variant versions.
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