On Wed, Jul 01, 2026 at 06:13:47AM -0400, Neal Gompa wrote: > On Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 4:49 AM Daniel P. Berrangé <[email protected]> wrote:
[...] > > The problem with a "simple web app" is that while the initial job > > may look simple, and impl may even be simple, we then have an > > ongoing never ending burden to support this web app. > > > > We've got a long (and disappointing) track record in Fedora of building > > things and then being unable to support them sufficiently well due to > > lack of resources, especially when the original author moves on. > > We have a long history of not providing community support for > Fedora-originated projects. Infrastructure or otherwise, it's rare for > a project coming from Fedora to be broadly successful because there is > no designed intent to market them and build communities around them. The "designed intent" to market stuff is for corporate products. For community projects, it's more organic and messier. You know this as a long-timer in OSS field yourself ;-) [...] > I would rather us go down the road of making simple web apps for this > stuff. I'm not sure if the limited engineering time is worth spending on such things (even with AI's help). People are already spread quite thin. > What we need to own up to is that we cannot count on Fedora > itself to be an advocate for projects built by Fedora contributors. > Those contributors need to actively do community-building work > themselves. You seem to talk as if "Fedora contributors" and "Fedora itself" are distinct entities. (I don't know if you're referring to Council or something else). And active community-building requires "personpower", the trade-offs involved: whether it makes _sense_ to do it, _who_ should do it, who has the time to do it, and so on. > > We can't even get sufficient resources to support & develop critical > > infrastructure such as our accounts system (see recent discussions > > about its sub-optimal support for 2FA that no one has had time to > > improve for years). > > > > I mean, this one is mostly the fault of FreeIPA. It isn't designed for > community projects, and shoehorning it into Fedora has resulted in > this flaw. This sounds like an unfair characterization of the folks doing the work involved. I don't know if anyone else came up with better alternatives that suit Fedora's needs and was willing to put in the work. > It won't be fixed because no corporate customer of IdM > needs it, since the model works for business deployments. Sounds like an assumption. Maybe if we ask nicely withouht throwing barbs, they might listen. > It isn't going to get fixed because IdM doesn't consider Fedora an > important customer/stakeholder/etc for feature development. I don't know the full background here, but again, this reads like an assumption. [...] > > Deploying and maintaining a code forge is a non-trivial undertaking, > > so it makes alot of sense to maximise its benefits to the project > > by considering whether it can be put into service for other use > > cases we have, such as the Change proposal workflow. > > > > "Build vs buy" is an argument as old as time. But every time we choose > "buy" instead of "build", the Fedora contributor experience has gotten > worse. Can we please stop doing that? This sounds like you are framing your personal take as "universal truth". There's only so much energy and time to "build". As always, it's a matter of figuring out the trade-offs involved. > > IOW, while I agree with your concerns about usability to some degree, > > Fedora has to be realistic about what we can do with our limited > > resources for infrasturucture & apps. I can't see it being a good > > use of resources to build & maintain a custom app for this. > > > > I also can't see it being a good idea to make it more difficult for > contributors, either. To be honest, I'd rather just keep the wiki and > maybe invest in an extension to support Markdown in the Fedora wiki. > The backlinking and historical data is incredibly valuable. Agreed, this is a important point -- to preserve the backlinks and historical archives of the Wiki. But that doesn't mean we have to _stay_ on the Wiki forever. We could mark it as read-only and move to Git-based, efficient workflows. (I know, this raises the bar for the technically-inclined to edit pages. So it's an open question whether we want to make the trade-off or not.) -- Kashyap Chamarthy / Red Hat / RISC-V and Fedora -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/tickets/issues/new
