(What happened to the good old 72 char line length for email, btw?) On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 03:13:11PM +0200, Per Jessen wrote: > Many thanks for your response. > So we've hit the crux of the problem - which seems pretty critical. > Although openSUSE is an "open" project, what goes and what doesn't is > still decided by the commercial needs requirements of Novell/SuSE.
You are right that the documentation and much of our communication needs fixing in this regard, but let me add why I think your base assumption is wrong ;-) The openSUSE project is not about you (the community) deciding what goes into SUSE Linux core and what not. It stays the base for all the other Linux products, and as you observed correctly, we can only accept patches that happen to move the distribution in the direction where we want to have it for our products. This doesn't work well together with the claim to be an open community project? Not quite, no. That's where the idea came from not to open up the distribution for everyone to add their pet patches to, but to allow for customizations that need not be added to the core in order to be useful. One solution for problems like your JFS woes is to allow you to patch a few packages and build your own distribution (install tree, iso images) with them, and to make sure that the process is as easy as possible (for a technical person at least). We might not want to take your patches, but we help you to create and use and maintain them and point others to your packages. And no, nothing of it exists yet, and believe us that we aren't to happy with that either. But this is the direction where the project can (and hopefully will) go to allow both: the core distribution which we continue to control, work on, test and improve on the one hand, and on the other a playground for experimenting, and a high-quality core distribution people can hack on and customize at their leisure. Sounds awfully vague at this point in time, I know. Sonja -- Sonja Krause-Harder ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Research & Development SUSE Linux Products GmbH --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
