[SoaS] [IAEP][DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel

[Martin Dengler]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 04:48:28PM -0400, Wade Brainerd wrote:
> Hi Martin,
> 
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 4:33 PM, Martin Dengler <martin at martindengler.com>wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 04:02:50PM -0400, Wade Brainerd wrote:
> > > Anyway, why are we talking about the effort to maintain a distro?
> >
> > Because we keep getting requests to look like a distro vendor:
> [...]
> Would switching to a Fedora Sugar spin distribution answer any of these
> questions?

No.  And my point is they're not being solved now.  Hopefully "there
is a problem that SL acts as if it's important that's not getting
solved but SL won't say it's going to solve it or not" is enough of an
answer to your question "why are we talking about this?".

> > SoaS obviously benefits from all of Fedora's work - just look how
> > > quickly it's moved from f10 to f11 to f12.  It's just a tweaked .ks
> > > file and a brand name.
> >
> > Have you tried building it lately? It's not rocket science but it's
> > not something I'd want to talk my parents through.
> >
> 
> Sure, I made some tweaks to the scripts to improve the way virtual machine
> images were being generated.  Like you said it's not the easiest thing in
> the world, but certainly something that a school's IT staff should be able
> to handle.

Wait, so is the school's staff going to do it?  I've been asking
about SL doing it.

Again, I'm not sure how much clearer I can bring the issue into
relief:

Distributions are more work than SL has put into SoaS.  Is SL going to
increase its GNU/Linux distro efforts and do the work of distributing
SoaS?

If so, great, now we have to find those extra hours in the day.  If
not, well we can all carry on doing our best and not feeling like
we're over-promising.


> Do we want children to use Sugar? If so, we need to do what it takes to make
> that possible.  All those emails and nasty issues need to be
> answered.
> 
> Right now, we are the only people who can do so are on these lists, and SoaS
> is the place they get fixed.
> 
> If in the future, Fedora solves all these issues for us, our kickstart file
> will get a lot simpler.

I keep asking you "who's going to do the work that SoaS isn't doing -
SL?" and you keep saying "SoaS is".

> I'm trying to point out that SL had better have an idea of what it
> > wants out of SoaS if it wants to invest time in it.  So far it seems
> > like SL wants to put in (great) marketing and get out a linux distro
> > that beats Fedora in hardware and community support.
> 
> 
> I don't understand this point, which seems to be the crux of the issue...
> SoaS *is* Fedora.

I just don't see what you don't see :).

a) SL is investing time in SoaS, not Fedora.  We're not asking GPA to
file bugs in bugzilla, we point them to launchpad.  We're not asking
them to email fedora{,-olpc}-list at redhat.com.

b) saying "SoaS *is* Fedora"...I just boggle.  Delete the soas git
repo.  See how far Fedora gets GPA.

Perhaps as an exercise you can continue b) and say "what if SL didn't
have SoaS and just had Fedora".  This is in fact a viable option.  If
you argue that SL must not use Fedora's distro-vendor tools, and SoaS
should have its own, well, QED:

> ... it seems like SL wants [...] a linux distro that beats Fedora in
> hardware and community support.


> Are there any circumstances where Fedora would work better than SoaS
> on target hardware?

No.  I have no idea to what point your question is relevant.
Juxtaposed with the point immediately prior, it's hopefully clear I'm
saying the opposite: SL wants SoaS to be better than Fedora.  And SL
needs to say "we want to roll our own distro that's better than [a set
of big linux distros]".

It's almost as if you really, really don't want to just say that,
despite saying lots of less concise things that boil down to the same
thing:

> Do we want children to use Sugar? If so, we need to do what it takes
> to make that possible.  All those emails and nasty issues need to be
> answered.

Perhaps you can summarise what you think we're arguing about?  I think
we're arguing about:

1) is SoaS a separate distro to Fedora

2) should SL distribute a distro of its own

3) can SL do this (#2) additional work

> -Wade

Martin

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