@mpearson filed Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #441. Discuss here and record votes and decisions in the ticket.
The request is straightforward to me and I see no reason why we should not vote on this ASAP. I made a +1 vote on the ticket.
About a process for how to do this… does it make sense for the Council to be the deciding body here? While some Council members might be more equipped than others to respond to things like this (e.g. @dcantrell as our FESCo rep), it feels like a decision that would have deeper insight and feedback from FESCo than Council. I’m wondering if we should drive a new Council policy here or if we should find some sort of load-sharing role here with FESCo, whose technical expertise feels more valuable on weighing in on cases like this.
1 Like
It’s right for the Council to make this decision, since it’s essentially a trademark question.
But to your point, I’ll share what I said in email to Mark:
[T]his is a question that will arise in the future from other corners as well, particularly if we’re successful in our attempts to expand the availability of Fedora Linux pre-loaded on hardware. I’d
like to be able to have some kind of consistent basis for these sorts of decisions (and ideally, avoid folks having to file an issue in the first place)
This isn’t a technical decision so much as a “product” decision: what can a distributor change and still call it “Fedora Linux”? We’ve previously said disabling SELinux is out of bounds, but there are a lot of other config changes that we wouldn’t object to. In the interests of not having to deal with this question every time, we should have some kind of policy. Whether we do that at the Council level or delegate it to FESCo to draft doesn’t particularly matter to me.
This is probably a split thing — we should have some guidance for what we want conceptually at the Project / Council level, with specifics delegated to FESCo.
If the Council input is valuable, I’d prefer for this process to start with FESCo on the basis of the technical decision, and once approved, then flow to the Fedora Council for approval on the use of the trademark with the modified image. My perspective here is that I don’t think it is useful for the Fedora Council to muse on the technical details of modifications to the base image, and I feel that FESCo is competent to be a good steward of what kind of modifications are acceptable or unacceptable to a base image.
Does this make sense? If we went this route, we might need to create a policy that also delegates this authority to FESCo, because I imagine that FESCo might be hesitant to make this kind of call without support from the Council?
I personally would prefer to have the discussion about the rules (and if they get changed and how) separately from this specific request if possible.
I’m happy to be involved with that too, and offer insight from Lenovo perspective if that is helpful; but my intent with this request is that this is a one off exercise, and specific to this particular situation (that has been resolved ‘upstream’). I think trying to design rules that safe-guard what is and isn’t allowed is a big, complicated (and likely controversial) topic that will take a long time to resolve - it shouldn’t be rushed.
FWIW - My recommendation (with only limited thought) is that any exception should be requested, justified, considered, and approved and shouldn’t be an easy process. But I appreciate I’m not the one making the decisions 
If it’s possible to determine if there are any objections to the power setting change for these two platforms for Fedora 37, that would be really helpful. Right now the platforms have been blocked with Fedora and realistically if we can’t get this change into manufacturing quickly it’s going to get lost in the wave of all the 2023 platforms that are about to happen and will take priority.
Thanks
Mark
1 Like
That makes sense. Given that this is a change already happening in F38, that it is required to pass the regulatory tests, and that it seems like a the right thing for the world, I think we should do a quick +1 to this specific exception at the Council level, and split out coming up with a general policy.
(I will record my vote for that in the ticket.)
Additionally, I propose that we defer asking for a policy until the second time this comes up. Because let’s not over-policy. If this is a once every couple of years thing, looking individually seems fine.
I’m not opposed to that, but in the past, FESCo has asked for the opposite — guiding principles from us, by which the technical policy can be established. (See the Updates policy, for example.)
The image is ready but they’re hesitant to spend time putting it in the QA cycle if it’s going to not be needed as all the new platforms are landing now - so there is some juggling.
If i say by end of the week is that OK? I’m guessing a bit as I don’t know what the QA team schedule really is - I just know I’m being nagged for a thumbs up or down (note - we do have to go and re-enter the certification with the new image too which will take a bit of time)
Ticket has been open for 5 days — let’s make it another 2 for a full seven and then call it official.
None from my end
1 Like
none from me either
Just checking - but as no objections are we good to go?
Thanks
Mark
Yes, sorry — good to go on the simple approval of this immediate thing. Some bigger-picture issues to be resolved.
Thanks everybody - appreciate the help!
Mark
Hi, the Council ticket is pending as open because of this comment:
Do we have a public page anywhere, wiki, docs site, thread on Discourse… for the “Fedora on Lenovo” initiative, where this information can be stored, so we can refer to it in the future?
Is someone willing to bottom-line this? Is there a directive on how to push this forward? Perhaps I could try and convince @mpearson to help with this, but I feel like we would first owe him more guidance on how to do this right in a community context.
@bookwar, @mattdm, @dcantrell, any thoughts to add here?
@sumantrom, since this seems related to quality work and decisions made about the distro, maybe you have thoughts on how best to document decisions like this from a quality-team perspective?
Or maybe @joseph too for ideas on the best way to do this, since there is already a long topic about promoting Lenovo’s Fedora OEM preloads?
I think a docs section owned by Mark and team would be ideal. (We could do similar for the Slimbook folks. Or, if everyone can get along, we could have a joint repo with pages for each manufacturer.)
We could also have a page in the Council Policies, but I think this kind of temporary exception is too small for that, really.
I was pondering on this…
+1.
Each vendor should be empowered to own their docs while another neutral group own the responsibility of maintaining the collective information.
Q&A:
What is the benefit for a vendor to maintain the official Fedora Docs in their own platform or organization?
A vendor may want to maintain the information in a variety of ways, and the source may be stored inside or outside of typical Fedora VCS repos. This gives the vendor the choice of creating a new repo closer to development or engineering teams, e.g. in the vendor’s GitHub organization.
A trusted, neutral group overseeing the collective information helps to steward the information and clear blockers should they arise. The neutral group would not write content as much as they would maintain it or create content guidelines for the information.
How would this work in our docs infrastructure?
This could translate into our existing tools with a top-level Antora module[1] maintained by the neutral group, perhaps FESCo. A vendor could create a new public git repo wherever they like, and those could be built as sub-modules of the top-level Antora module. This way, all the vendor-neutral content remains unified under the top-level Antora module, and the vendor-specific information is attached to the neutral content as independently-managed sub-modules.
I’d need someone more familiar with Antora to verify this though, because while Antora should theoretically be able to do this, I haven’t seen it done yet in Fedora.
If this approach seems feasible, then either me or another Council member could take the action point of finding whether there is a neutral group to steward the documentation and helping soft-launch a docs site, before handing it over to the maintainers.
This could also be too ambitious and something simple would be better, in which case, I’d like to know more about a simpler courses of action.
I may be misusing Antora terms here, pardon any mistakes. ↩︎
1 Like
This is something that’s currently being discussed in the Marketing Team. What I was thinking was to compile a list of all the Fedora supported computers. These are ones where the OEM has confirmed they are making Fedora work on the machines. There could be three buckets: Fedora preload you can buy now, Linux preloaded you can buy now that supports Fedora, Fedora supported computer you can buy now.
The process I figured was to compile that list in a table, get it validated by our partner vendors where we had questions, and then work with the Websites & Apps Team to have this get a proper web page on our new website that’s all spiffy like everything else.
If we want to also have this in Docs, we can have the fancy simplified version on the main website and a more detailed table in Docs. We could also use the maintained information in Docs to inform changes to the main web page.
As of now I’ve had that as an action item for the Marketing Team, but vendor support would be needed whether they’re physically managing the list or not. They are the only ones who could confirm whether a product is or is not supported.
Keep trying to reply to this and getting side-tracked 3rd attempt…
This particular ticket issue is very niche and should be extremely rare…not sure it’s really worthy of triggering a whole big documentation exercise. Should this be a separate thread? I’m hesitant to write a big complicated reply just because of that…
However, in brief notes to the above:
- Happy to do whatever documentation wise is wanted - whether for just this issue or for a bigger scale project. Point me at what and where.
- For something bigger - agree that having oversight for vendors is probably wise. Hopefully unnecessary…but wise.
- If you want something that is purely focused on Fedora then suggest keeping it on the fedoraproject.org space. Access to our site is definitely more complicated (e.g I can’t just edit lenovo.com/linux)
Mark
2 Likes