Some German-speaking long term Fedora contributers discussed the state of Fedora and how things evolved over the past year (e.g. since the merge). Find below a brief summary (e.g. the short version without all the details; if you need some ask); please note that I moved things to the top of the list that came up multiple times.

Some people think...

• it takes way to much time until updated packages hit the repo (this came up a lot of times); the pushes need to happen way more often, especially for security updates;
• lack of coordination/direction/project management and documentation how things (Board, FESCo, ...) work together; Missing/incomplete transparency with regard to decision-finding and liability at the level of the Fedora Project Board (some people belive 'that many decisions come directly from within Red Hat').
• a discussion how to move forward with the VCS is lingering around way to long and doing harm. CVS works, but it's really slow and standing in the way to get things done quicker and better
• there are to much rules and regulations that even for someone who as been around for a long time it is hard to keep track of things.

Yet the fun thing is: For things where you expect regulations there are non... The wiki is also a mess; it's hard to find informations;

• the merge itself is nice, but the quality of fedora as a distro got worse since the merge (this resulted in a long discussion with lots of details; some of the points raised there made it into this document, but not all)
• the bodhi roll out was premature; bodhi still seems to be mostly bureaucracy for some people.
• the sponsership model doesn't scale anymore; part of the problem: nearly no new sponsors were approved during 2007; that slowly seems to improve again since a few weeks, but that doesn't solve the problem; we also need new ways to become a package maintainer, as a lot of stuff people use daily is packaged already so it's hard to become contributor
• fedora got worse for servers and people fear things like dbus on servers, deps for server/command line stuff tracks desktop packages in
• the packaging guidelines became to complicated and to hard to understand; they seem to have rules for every little detail these days; the packaging documentation overall could be better to make it easier to find things.
• the review are not as good as in the past anymore; reviews stick to the guidelines instead of thinking what might be right or wrong;
• ACLs in CVS are a PITA. On the other hand some people argue that ACLs are needed, as freshly sponsored contributors otherwise get access to way to much areas to quickly. Fixing both problems and a general more "wiki-style" approach for maintaining packages was on FESCo's agenda in early 2007, but it nearly got forgotten for about one year due to the merge (e.g. it slowly came up again in December but is far from finished).
• (Related to the ACLs) the co-maintainership policy needs a update and we need to teach contributors better that this is a community effort and not a "only the package owner can modify the package"
• it's hard to get a new package into the buildroot to rebuild another package against it.
• getting updates from different maintainers out in a coordinated way (e.g. a new library and the packages rebuild against it) is hard
• there is a lack of direction/no target we aim for. Are we a test bed for RHEL? Do we want to rule the Desktop? Or the Server? All at once?
• there is a lack of guidelines how to do updates -- some people follow a debian stable like approach for released versions, others a "latest and greatest everywhere" always; that sometimes looks quite odd in the end if you get latest and greatest for foo and bar, but not for baz and foobar
• the overall speed of the tools (CVS, bodbi, pkgdb, ...) is bad. Especially the websites are too slow to be used efficiently.
• CVS requests work fine, but why can't there a more automatic solution for this?
• Mismanagement and inflation of mailing-lists. That includes, but is not limited to:
  • fedora-devel is to high volume for some, fedora-devel-annouce on the other hand used not enough
  • developers and users are confused what lists are for what purpose
  • important things sometimes get discussed and decided on one of those lists dedicated to one topic -- fedora-devel subscribers thus sometimes miss important discussions or decisions.
• the Testing/QA group likely did and does a lot of work, but that is not really visible to the outside -- broken deps or other problems happen way to often;
• the comments people can do in bodhi seem to be not that much respected or helpful either; some people seems confused if they should comment in bodhi or if bugzilla is the proper place for their problems
• scripts to improve/check the packages exists, but are not being used regularly (e.g. scripts that check for conflicts, multilib problems, rpmlint, different .so files, ...)
• lots of regressions in package updates

• new technologies like for example NM, Juju-FireWire stack, PATA drivers pushed aggressively by RH, even if not completely ready yet; even worse, it is being prevented to use the older FireWire or IDE drivers that users are left out in the cold

• some red hat developers feel or act like if they were "special"; they for example knowingly ignore rules/guidelines, don't handle their bugs well or are unresponsive in general
• multilib problems