Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Diego Escalante Urrelo <diegoe gnome org>]

Hello Frederic :)

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 1:24 AM, Frederic Peters <fpeters gnome org> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
>
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?
>

My personal take on GNOME OS is that it certainly is ambitious, I like
the idea of expanding our user experience to a the system and not just
the desktop shell and some applications.
There'll always be some rough edges since we primarily hack on top of
Linux but I believe good will always take us to common interfaces and
APIs. It would be foolish to think we can coordinate every known
system/distributor out there on what /we/ want before we actually do
it.
Disclaimer: I've never worked on the low level parts of our stack, so
maybe I'm being naive :-).

As for the Foundation, I'll agree with what others already said:
technical matters are to be evaluated by release-team/maintainers.
However we can influence this with Hackfests or sponsoring work on a
certain area.
I'll echo Ryan that the current approach of
"let-happen-what-will-happen" can have negative consequences, I
believe the approach of Feature Proposals we are seeing can give us
better planning and more fruitful discussions.

This remined me that when we usually ask ourselves about "technical
lead" or "making things clear", I wonder if a team doing a lot of
coordination work (not decisions, working closely with RT) to get
everyone on the same channel would be a more efficient investment.
In my personal experience, sometimes hackers were missing the proper
introduction or a mediator to get things flowing. I'd like to explore
this as a solution under a more formal process than just "beer
budget".

Thanks for the question!