On Feb 10, 2014 12:10 PM, "Richard Hughes" <hughsient@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters <walters@verbum.org> wrote:
> > I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and
> > Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
>
> The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we
> want to use for workstation" is just crazy. I think we're kidding
> ourselves if we want to try and answer that question honestly when the
> biggest backer of the project by several orders of magnitude has
> several hundred engineers working full time on GNOME and lower parts
> of the stack that GNOME uses. If I remember correctly, we have about
> two employees on all of KDE, and one on XFCE. None on LXDE. None on
> MATE. Fedora may be a community distro, but without the backing of Red
> Hat, it wouldn't be viable at all. When there's a Fedora release
> blocker that needs a few days of developer time, who do you think
> picks up the tab? I think that's probably an important thing to
> understand before damaging the relationship any further on votes that
> can only result in huge flame wars and a lot of wasted time.

I think you are slightly overreacting here.  I do not believe any relationship has been damaged.  I also do not believe having an open discussion to start off a new effort is at all out of line.  Clearly the data you and Colin have pointed to is critical to the discussion and I thank you for elaborating on it.  I should have done so a bit more on my opening email. 

However what you might view as a flame war or a waste of time is really an opportunity to both reassess and reaffirm what some might take for granted (including myself).  It also allows us to gather information on other developments in upstreams we might not pay attention to.  That information has other benefits outside of this specific discussion as well given that part of the PRD is clearly aimed at commonality amidst the various DEs.

So while the end result may be what most expect, the discussion is still necessary.  As I said, this is not a popularity contest.  I appreciate the participation from all sides thus far and I am looking forward to making an informed decision this week.

josh

(Forgive the formatting, I'm typing on s phone in the airport)