Featureful.

I was just looking at the proposed Fedora 10 features category on the wiki. There are over a dozen cool features being set up for this next release. (If I read the pages right, some may even be finished already in Rawhide.) Check some of these out:

• Better LIRC support – The vast majority of users need to experience the awesomeness of using their laptop’s remote for presentations and demos. (The one that came with my Dell laptop works great, but my laptop tends to stay with me and doesn’t scale.) ? Bastien Nocera is working on this upstream in GNOME.
• Better Webcam support – Ace packager Hans de Goede is working on this together with upstream communities for gspcav2 and the kernel.
• TightVNC is a more current codebase that has a lot of improvements over the default VNC implementation. Adam Tkac is working hard on merging the changes that have occurred over time in Fedora’s default VNC with the many changes in TightVNC, to produce a package that will more closely follow the active upstream project.

There are plenty more on the list, too. These are all proposed, meaning FESCo will look at the proposals in their regular meetings and vote on approval. As time moves on, these proposal pages may probably change to include additional information, as part of the march to approval or completion.

One of the improvements we’re trying to have in the feature process is definition of QA and testing. That doesn’t mean that feature owners have to write a huge test plan, but it does mean that they might need to declare how our QA contributors can test whether something works. That testing means features can hopefully be included with higher confidence. It also plants a sort of flag in the ground indicating the goal the feature needs to reach by the end of the development cycle to be included in the final release.

We also want to maintain in the feature process the excellent message value it yields. When Fedora floating-spokes-heads like myself can point at features for examples of technical might in the distribution, we can drive more interest in use and contribution. This worked incredibly well for the Fedora 9 release, as mentioned in the closing comments from FUDCon (~27:20). That means feature owners and the larger community both prosper from the relatively small amount of time it takes to engage in the process!

If you see a feature you’d like to propose, there are ways to do that. FESCo votes on feature approval up until the feature planning process ends (August 19). There is still time to propose features — take a look at the feature policy page for more information on how the process works, and feel free to ask questions of our resident feature wrangler, John Poelstra.