All it takes is code, and time...

Hans, Kevin, thanks for taking up the idea from my mail and discussing it further. I don't have the energy anymore for driving such discussions much further, as I got the impression that it's not worth the trouble in Fedora-land these days. In the end there is often a lot of discussion and wasted time. The hurdles to fix it yourself are often way to high as well. Thus the problems stay and don't get fixed (and surely there is a problem here that needs fixing).

See the "Firefox update breaks repo" problem, which we have for years now. Instead of letting someone do for released updates what Jeremy did for rawhide some days ago the problem comes up every few weeks or months again. But no, FESCo discussed it ages ago and then forgot about it during the merge; like so many things. Lot's of good ideas from different people afaics don't get realized because we have committees and bureaucracy everywhere and people yelling "show me code" instead of being helpful and say "yeah, that problem needs fixing; not sure if your idea is the best, but we put it on the Board/FESCo/FPC schedule and will try to fix it over the next months; we'd appreciate your help with that and bring you in contact with the right people".

It's imho really frustrating. In Extras contributers helped each other out and FESCo tried to work towards a better Fedora Extras for users and contributers. We lost that "help each other for the common goal" during the merge afaics.

While writing some of my frustration on the state of Fedora down: Max, where do you see new leaders emerging in packaging land (e.g. old Fedora Extras)? Most if not all of those that are in FESCo, FPC, the Board or active on the lists these days are the same people that were as much active in Fedora Core or Extras one or two years ago already. So I'd say there is a stagnation here. In fact we even lost some people afaics, so it's going down -- the low number of volunteers during the last FESCo election is a indicator for that.

Another indicator for stagnation: we didn't get much (any?) new sponsors during the past months during and after the merge afaics (¹). In the past we each meeting asked for nominations and approved about one or two new sponsors per month -- it was even on the schedule each time so people that might want to self-nominate got a reminder where to self-nominate.

(¹) -- I have no hard numbers, but I got the impression there were just very few new sponsors over the past months. Does anyone have real numbers?

Fedora planet and english speaking feeds

The current discussion on "fedora planet and english speaking feeds" IMHO is a good example for what I call the "Fedora knows better then you what's good for you and thus Fedora only gives you what Fedora thinks is best"-attitude which IMHO becomes more and more a problem in different areas of the project.

IOW: There is no black and white here. Some people want a multi-lingual feed, others a english-only one (and likely others a German or a French one as well) -- there are good arguments for both sides. Thus we need to give people the choice here and have a sane default -- otherwise people stop reading Fedora Planet (like for example Pete did), which is not what we want. So thanks Airlied for setting such a feed up.

I hope we can have the feed alongside the current one on planet.fedoraproject.org/ in the future -- e.g let planet.fedoraproject.org/ be the default and multi-lingual while en.planet.fedoraproject.org/ (or planet.fedoraproject.org/en/ ?) serves those who want English only. Problem solved, everybody happy.

BTW: I don't care much about the non-english content -- the amount for me was up to now still acceptable. Okay, sometimes it was starting to become annoying and nearly reached the this-is-really-annoying trigger level -- but only nearly for me. But I suppose sooner or later with more feeds being tracked it would have been triggered, as it did now for Lennart afaics.

Further: A non-english post on an english-only planet now and then IMHO is likely no problem and I assume acceptable for everyone. It's normal that some post are off-topic in the blog/planet world afaics -- just like the post from Lennart was not really on topic for other planets like planet.gnome.org.

The difference between IRC and mailing lists

On IRC if you enter #fedora-devel and ask a question that is off-topic and more suitable for #fedora you get pointed there.

The question itself is not answered normally (even if it's a real easy one). Seems there is a silent agreement between those in the channel to not answer, as the questioner (or someone else) might come up with even more off-topic questions or comments sooner or later in the channel.

On fedora-devel-list@redhat.com that's handled differently.