SIGs/Desktop/Meeting-20070815

2007 Aug 15 Desktop Meeting

Present

• Matthias Clasen
• Chris Aillon
• Steven Garrity
• David Zeuthen
• Jonathan Blandford
• Christopher Blizzard
• Ray Strode
• Jesse Keating
• Jeremy Katz
• Lennart Pottering

Summary

Agenda

• Organizational questions
• Goals and scope
• Concrete plans for F8 desktop spin
• Longer term plans

Organizational Questions

• do this on a weekly basis?
• Agreement that it's a good idea
• Need to schedule it for every wed @ 2pm EDT (18:00 UTC)
• Can be short meetings if required

Goals

• Based on goals from SIG Page
• targeted spin (livecd) is the entry point and changing a lot of post-install defaults, but upgrades are still done using the normal repo and yum
• mechanism
• concrete examples: networkmanager by default
• extra repo might be required and is controversial - will avoid if possible
• still in the scope of Fedora
• package builds all still come from cvs
• might require a board exception because of seperate repo
• first goal has to be to make a kick ass desktop distro (to be defined later)
• lots of low-to-medium hanging fruit to work on?
• also could do different user experience ala OLPC + Online Desktop
• lots of things that are inappropriate for server installs but we would want to do for desktop
• breaks down into simple configuration and some fundamental choices
• how do we organize our goals around these two sets of items?
• so some of it is doing architecture work and that needs to be called out
• and lots of polish as well (low hanging fruit)
• spending time looking at other distro work is important as well
• how do we put it? finding the balance between polish and infrastructure work?

Set of ideas for activities for the SIG

• Look at what others are doing
• Planning (as resources allow) integration of large arch changes (HAL, others)
• Identify polish, low hanging fruit and opportunity
• Shared laundry list on the wiki? (ala yellow pad bug?)
• Oversee improvements that involve more than one bug/project/app

Decision Making

• how about decision making? who and how?
• have to have someone who can make decisions - matthias is the obvious choice but we're not quite there yet

who is on the sig and interested

• links from the SIG members to blogs might be good

what does the scope of desktop cover?

• first instinct is packages? probably too limiting because it's more than just a package set
• defintion should be based around experience (i.e. boot experience isn't normally desktop, but should be because it affects the experience)

low hanging fruit

• first order of business: send out a list of low hanging fruit to the mailing list and get things kicked off - lots of things to fix!
• fit-and-polish
• Action Item: DavidZ to send out a first list of polish stuff

goals need updating

• (blizzard + matthais + jrb) with new info and also add a section about scope and decision making (AI: Blizzard)

Concrete goals for F8 LiveCD Spin

• kill xfs
• kill pam console
• nm by default
• pa by default

boot process

• can we do stuff with dbus launching instead of from initscripts?
• package up boot chart (AI: Adam Jackson)
• help getting package reviews would help a lot
• set a goal for the boot process? (lots of random discussion here)
• probably something like 20s, but not making progress here
• goal for F8 is to cull unrequired stuff and make the livecd a lot faster for now - can discuss later

user management/guess account

• davidz wants to add it to gdm instead of firstboot
• new gdm coming right after f8
• people think that's a good thing
• some discussion of gdm
• move back to the installer? no thanks
• f-u-s seems like a reasonable thing to do
• guest account prototype - maybe enough time to do it?

time zone changing in clock applet

• assigned to davidz and is pretty easy