Fedora will engage customers is what hit the news sites, during FUDCon. And with Extras, and what happened, we seemed relatively successful with the meeting and then the launch of the committee. Then we also did the fedora-maintainers list, which seems to not have gone down so well, in-spite of the -readonly copy of it. Acceptance of it has been spotty at best, reading fedora-devel-list.
But it is a necessary evil. Power isn’t reserved for an elite group, and Seth points out quite nicely other private partys. But where do we draw the line is the question. I was part of the unanimous decision to create the semi-private party at fedora-maintainers, because there was no way all the @redhat’s were to sit at f-d-l, and there was quite the bit of noise. Its a fair requirement that if you maintain a package you get placed on another list. You are now a valuable contributor, as opposed to being a regular noise maker, no?
Take the recent “let’s slim Fedora Core 4 down” discussion. I’m even afraid to count how many messages there were for that. The point of -maintainers is that we figure people won’t bring up the “lets move GNOME/KDE to Extras” kind of discussion. The same discussion gets old. Read the list archives. But the core problem with open source is that everyone feels they need to have an opinion. And everyone feels that their opinion is right. And is the be all, and the end all.
So FC-4 is going to have 5 CDs. Abiword, Exim, bzflag and a whole bunch of other useful packages are disappearing from Core. But they’re not gone anywhere. They’ll be in Extras. Extras will even be enabled, by default, in /etc/yum.repos.d/, so if you’re missing bzflag, a simple “yum install bzflag” will get you happy again. “Core is what Red Hat maintains. Extras is what the community maintains,” aoliva says. And yes, Red Hat is part of the community.
Back to communication. We’re still not definitely good at it. But if there are wanting contributors, the Extras/IdeasSandbox is a good place to start. We have a public schedule for the “shit that needs to get done”. And the Fedora News Updates will come back, as Fedora Traffic; so if you were a wanting contributor, now’s a good time to send me some e-mail.