On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 09:38:38PM -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 07:52:55PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 05:16:14PM -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 01:11:47PM -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
The way things are now "works" because of status quo. We tell anybody who wants to change status quo to go start a fork and do it there.
Wait... The entire list of times I can remember someone being encouraged to take their contributions elsewhere are:
- Kernel modules
- Non-free software
- Free software with legal issues
- I think something to do with packaging content may have resulted in
something but I don't know anything about the outcome there.
Who's been told to fork Fedora because of the status-quo-target-audience?
Not in so many words, but the whole Zope/Plone fiasco from a few releases ago seems a prime example here. Fedora moved on with python, and we didn't allow a compat-python package for Zope and Plone to continue working. The reasons were varied, but they boiled down to python being a framework and having two frameworks providing almost identical things was not deemed to be something Fedora was going to do [1].
Once again, not a target audience decision. We didn't say, "Fedora is not for web developers, therefore we don't care enough to support zope and plone". We said, the python maintainer thinks that supporting multiple python stacks is infeasible therefore we aren't going to support this. It was a contributor and technical decision. Not a target-audience decision.
It is. It's one step removed. There were people actively wanting to make Zope/Plone work via a compat-python stack. It went all the way to FESCo and got voted down. The zope/plone users were the target audience there. There were people willing to do the work, all they needed was a yes from FESCo. We told them no. As Jesse has mentioned, 'status quo' won out.
Those are the kinds of headaches Bill is talking about.
And I agree there are headaches there. But I think if something is valuable enough to a contributor, they'll step up to solve the headaches if they're requisites to being able to fulfill their vision. Instead of forbidding things we should be identifying the headaches and allowing them
Not sure if you truncated that last sentence, but this whole paragraph sounds counter to your one above.
After all, everything we do now is one big headache. Yet we have contributors willing to deal with every aspect of that.
Everything we do is a big headache? I'm prone to hyperbole myself, but that's a bit over the top. If everything was a headache, nobody would volunteer for it.
josh