subject:"Stable Release Updates types proposal \(was Re\: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010\-03\-11\)"

On 03/13/2010 03:24 AM, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
 Rahul Sundaram wrote:
   

 So now users who don't contribute are leeches? Wow. Just wow.   Without
 users, contributors wouldn't have much of a motivation to contribute.
 
 Yes.

 Interesting how you define users as people that give a warm fuzzy 
 feeling to packagers. Great!
   

No, I don't.  I have to ask you to stop trying to put words into my
mouth only to diss them. I want to Fedora to be used outside of a core
contributor group.   If Fedora is only usable for contributors and
contributors only, we will lose contributors ironically because being I
want to use Fedora as well for my work.  Besides that, I would like to
be able to share Fedora with friends and family.  If I can't reliably do
that, then my motivation to contribute significantly decreases if not
goes away completely.   I know that I am not alone in that position.

I also disagree strongly with any notion that users are leeches.

Rahul
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Jon Masters

On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 21:48 +0100, Thomas Janssen wrote:

 Why, do you think, should just a single user change to Fedora, away
 from Ubuntu or any other Distro? Because we're blue?

If the only reason to choose Fedora over Ubuntu is because Fedora shoves
out updates at a higher pace into stable releases, then something is
severely wrong. There are many good reasons to choose either distro. I
happen to quite like both, for different reasons. Fedora moves new
features into rawhide at a higher pace, and Ubuntu is something that I
could see a newcomer having a lot of success with. But none of that has
anything to do with what should be happening in stable Fedora releases.

 the same just in RPM? Some slow-it-down-people do really think that
 a half baken X-server 1.7beta will make users of other distros go away
 because they use just 1.6, or our release kernel is 2.6.31.3 and
 others have 2.6.31.1 trough release-time?

I don't care whether some new hardware gets enabled through an update. I
would rather that happen in rawhide and the users who can't use the
hardware in the stable release have to wait an average of 3 months in
the worst case that there isn't some level of support available now. Few
other Operating Systems move at that kind of pace anyway. I do care that
regressions in the kernel, X, or some other subsystem might break things
that users who are supported are relying on, just to enable other stuff.
To me, the fear of regressions outweighs any possible other benefit.

This isn't Enterprise Linux. I don't need a support period covering the
equivalent of 14 Fedora release cycles, I am fully happy with some
considerable churn every 6 or 12 months on my desktop or laptop in the
interest of being up to date with the latest tech, but I am not happy to
have that churn be on a normal non-upgrade day when I expect my laptop
to work (and an update just before a meeting to be safe with respect to
that laptop running a presentation immediately afterward). Somewhat
shockingly, some people do use Fedora for day to day stuff.

 You will never get a single user of the other distros if you dont have
 anything special to offer.

Fedora offers a higher rate of new and experimental features. Those
should be kept in rawhide *where they belong*, for 6 months, until they
have had some decent testing and are ready to be released. Users are
users, they are not guinea pigs to be experimented upon.

Jon.


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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread drago01

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Jon Masters jonat...@jonmasters.org wrote:

 the same just in RPM? Some slow-it-down-people do really think that
 a half baken X-server 1.7beta will make users of other distros go away
 because they use just 1.6, or our release kernel is 2.6.31.3 and
 others have 2.6.31.1 trough release-time?

 I don't care whether some new hardware gets enabled through an update. I
 would rather that happen in rawhide and the users who can't use the
 hardware in the stable release have to wait an average of 3 months in
 the worst case that there isn't some level of support available now. Few
 other Operating Systems move at that kind of pace anyway. I do care that
 regressions in the kernel, X, or some other subsystem might break things
 that users who are supported are relying on, just to enable other stuff.
 To me, the fear of regressions outweighs any possible other benefit.

Sorry but I strongly disagree here, waiting three months to be able to
use hardware is unacceptable.
Waiting for a shiny new feature is perfectly fine, but being able to
use the hardware is something completely different.

Other operating systems benefit from hardware vendors shipping drivers
with the hardware, and still even MS ships updated hardware support as
updates.
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Thomas Janssen

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Jon Masters jonat...@jonmasters.org wrote:
 On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 21:48 +0100, Thomas Janssen wrote:

 Why, do you think, should just a single user change to Fedora, away
 from Ubuntu or any other Distro? Because we're blue?

 If the only reason to choose Fedora over Ubuntu is because Fedora shoves
 out updates at a higher pace into stable releases, then something is
 severely wrong.

Yes, it is exactly the only reason (well, maybe besides it's blue).
And no, nothing is wrong.

 There are many good reasons to choose either distro. I
 happen to quite like both, for different reasons. Fedora moves new
 features into rawhide at a higher pace, and Ubuntu is something that I
 could see a newcomer having a lot of success with. But none of that has
 anything to do with what should be happening in stable Fedora releases.

I have had a lot of distros and i still have two on my boxen. This, my
main Laptop has Fedora (exactly because of the only reason) and my
others run openSUSE. The only difference why i have Fedora on this
laptop and contribute to Fedora is exactly the one reason i had to
choose Fedora over anything else. The reason you want to kill.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not married with Fedora, i can leave if it
doesn't fit me anymore, i sure will do since i can choose. I could run
rawhide, sure, but what's the difference then to run factory, or
cooker.

 the same just in RPM? Some slow-it-down-people do really think that
 a half baken X-server 1.7beta will make users of other distros go away
 because they use just 1.6, or our release kernel is 2.6.31.3 and
 others have 2.6.31.1 trough release-time?

 I don't care whether some new hardware gets enabled through an update. I
 would rather that happen in rawhide and the users who can't use the
 hardware in the stable release have to wait an average of 3 months in
 the worst case that there isn't some level of support available now. Few
 other Operating Systems move at that kind of pace anyway. I do care that
 regressions in the kernel, X, or some other subsystem might break things
 that users who are supported are relying on, just to enable other stuff.
 To me, the fear of regressions outweighs any possible other benefit.

Well, hardware support is urgent, but drago01 answered that already eloquent.

 This isn't Enterprise Linux. I don't need a support period covering the
 equivalent of 14 Fedora release cycles, I am fully happy with some
 considerable churn every 6 or 12 months on my desktop or laptop in the
 interest of being up to date with the latest tech, but I am not happy to
 have that churn be on a normal non-upgrade day when I expect my laptop
 to work (and an update just before a meeting to be safe with respect to
 that laptop running a presentation immediately afterward). Somewhat
 shockingly, some people do use Fedora for day to day stuff.

Ugh, what a shock, yeah it's really shocking me that you even think
about to update your box right before a presentation, but hey, to each
their own. This is my day to day stuff box as well. Though i don't cry
if something happens, but try to fix it or find a workaround. But
before the last sentence gets answered out of the context, i saw maybe
a handful of sh!t happen since Fedora 8. And none of this was really
bad, thanks to the Developers fixing it *extremely* fast.
So please stop crying people. We have some of the best developers out there.

 You will never get a single user of the other distros if you dont have
 anything special to offer.

 Fedora offers a higher rate of new and experimental features.

The typical bla bla. Sorry. But to inform you, that's exactly one of
the reasons who keep people away from Fedora. Well, that and some
boneheaded devels who think whatever it is, it is not my software.
And Fedora isn't the only inventor of stuff. I really get slowly sick
of that. Because exactly the same people who play that card, are
crying in the first place if one of those features bites them at
release time.

 Those
 should be kept in rawhide *where they belong*, for 6 months, until they
 have had some decent testing and are ready to be released.

Do you really think you can find all of the problems of some
experimental software just because it sits in rawhide and it's waiting
to be tested from the masses? I doubt that.

 Users are
 users, they are not guinea pigs to be experimented upon.

If you don't want to be a guinea pig, turn your computer off and learn
to get your day to day stuff done with paper and a pen. Or use a
Enterprise Linux or a LTS version of a modern distro. You're in *any*
modern distro/OS, more or less the guinea pig. Because nobody can test
their software on any hardware and any set of software installed.
Welcome to the real world.

What you most likely want is better QA.

Sorry, again, not a single argument why Fedora should change away from
what it is.

-- 
LG Thomas

Dubium sapientiae initium
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Peter Hutterer wrote:
 Isn't there a mere RISK to lose 70-80% of our users if we do _not_
 implement the changes as well? Especially given the chance that the poll
 did not represent a significant user sample?

Not a very credible one, given that those users are happily using Fedora as 
it is now!

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On 03/14/2010 10:13 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Peter Hutterer wrote:
   
 Isn't there a mere RISK to lose 70-80% of our users if we do _not_
 implement the changes as well? Especially given the chance that the poll
 did not represent a significant user sample?
 
 Not a very credible one, given that those users are happily using Fedora as 
 it is now!

Can we drop the absolutes which are clearly not true? Some users clearly
are not.  Otherwise we wouldn't been having such length discussions on
this topic.  I particularly don't like that there is no enforced policy
on updates whatsoever and parts of Fedora acts differently from another.

Rahul

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 So the right solution is to let you do your own disruptive changes in
 stable so you don't have to deal with other people disruptive changes in
 rawhide?

My changes, or really KDE SIG's changes, are NOT disruptive. They're minor 
feature releases which are backwards compatible at ABI/API level, which 
don't remove applications (in fact, I packaged KPilot standalone because 
upstream removed it from kdepim, I really care a lot about this kind of 
things!), which don't remove features from applications, which don't require 
any manual user interaction to perform, but which fix many bugs and add 
several great features. They're exactly the class of updates I do NOT want 
to lose.

 In the end, despite your repeated claims to represent the Fedora way,
 it seems to me your preferred way of operation relies heavily on your
 group being almost the only one to follow it, and if others followed
 your lead you wouldn't be so happy about it. And that stinks. Fedora
 spent a lot of time removing those kinds of asymetric arrangements from
 its workflow.

Nonsense. I'm actually unhappy about some groups not implementing the same 
type of policy. And no, we (KDE SIG) aren't the only one which does. E.g. 
the kernel was upgraded in F12, and also quite often in the past.

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On 03/14/2010 10:20 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
   
 So the right solution is to let you do your own disruptive changes in
 stable so you don't have to deal with other people disruptive changes in
 rawhide?
 
 My changes, or really KDE SIG's changes, are NOT disruptive.
   

I am sorry but that has been proved to be not true multiple times in the
past.  It is not the question of your dedication or the amount of work
you put into it. Really, you cannot expect to push such major changes
and not cause regressions for some users at the best.  We have done
reasonably well at times but it has always been a risky proposition.

Rahul
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Jon Masters wrote:
 If the only reason to choose Fedora over Ubuntu is because Fedora shoves
 out updates at a higher pace into stable releases, then something is
 severely wrong.

Why? It's exactly what's happening out there in the real world you chose to 
ignore, yet I don't see anything wrong with it.

 There are many good reasons to choose either distro. I happen to quite
 like both, for different reasons. Fedora moves new features into rawhide
 at a higher pace,

That alone is not sufficient to be the most up-to-date distribution, which 
is what many of our users choose us for, an aggressive post-release update 
policy is also needed.

In addition, shipping new features often means shipping early versions of 
new software which needs several feature updates to mature. KDE 4.0 would be 
the obvious example, but there were others as well.

 and Ubuntu is something that I could see a newcomer having a lot of
 success with.

So let them get the newcomers and stop worrying about things like:
* our update policies being too unstable for newcomers,
* simplifying our download page for newcomers by hiding most of our 
options (Want KDE? Play hideseek with us! Want 64-bit? Play hideseek with 
us! Want …)
etc.

 I don't care whether some new hardware gets enabled through an update. I
 would rather that happen in rawhide and the users who can't use the
 hardware in the stable release have to wait an average of 3 months in
 the worst case that there isn't some level of support available now. Few
 other Operating Systems move at that kind of pace anyway.

For those other Operating Systems, the drivers come in a CD with the 
hardware. In binary-only form and with a EULA attached, but that's what the 
native drivers of those other Operating Systems come as as well. We are 
not one of those other Operating Systems. We need the hardware to work out 
of the box.

And up to 6 months are way too long to wait to get your hardware working, by 
that time they'll have chosen some other distro, maybe one which happened to 
have a release schedule which aligned better with the hardware purchase 
(which is pure accident), and will never care about Fedora again. Quite the 
opposite: They'll always remember it as that distro that didn't work on my 
computer and talk bad about it to all their friends.

 I do care that regressions in the kernel, X, or some other subsystem might
 break things that users who are supported are relying on, just to enable
 other stuff. To me, the fear of regressions outweighs any possible other
 benefit.

If something regresses, there's always the old version to rollback to. If 
the hardware is just not supported, there's nothing to fall back to.

 This isn't Enterprise Linux. I don't need a support period covering the
 equivalent of 14 Fedora release cycles, I am fully happy with some
 considerable churn every 6 or 12 months on my desktop or laptop in the
 interest of being up to date with the latest tech, but I am not happy to
 have that churn be on a normal non-upgrade day when I expect my laptop
 to work (and an update just before a meeting to be safe with respect to
 that laptop running a presentation immediately afterward). Somewhat
 shockingly, some people do use Fedora for day to day stuff.

Then do your updates AFTER that presentation, not before. Where's the 
problem?

 Fedora offers a higher rate of new and experimental features. Those
 should be kept in rawhide *where they belong*, for 6 months, until they
 have had some decent testing and are ready to be released. Users are
 users, they are not guinea pigs to be experimented upon.

Many of our feature updates DID go through Rawhide first. They were just 
released on their own schedule, because they're nondisruptive enough to be 
pushed to a stable release and because Fedora's schedule aligns very poorly 
to the upstream schedule. For example, KDE 4.4 got A LOT of testing before 
it was pushed.

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Rex Dieter

Rahul Sundaram wrote:

  If Fedora is only usable for contributors and
 contributors only,

It's called focus (where have I heard that?).  Some people(1) want 
*contributors* to be focus is all.

-- Rex

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Rex Dieter

Rahul Sundaram wrote:

 On 03/14/2010 10:20 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
   
 So the right solution is to let you do your own disruptive changes in
 stable so you don't have to deal with other people disruptive changes in
 rawhide?
 
 My changes, or really KDE SIG's changes, are NOT disruptive.

 I am sorry but that has been proved to be not true multiple times in the
 past. 

proved?  Really?   Suffice to say that we may have to agree to disagree 
with on statement.

-- Rex

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On 03/14/2010 11:10 PM, Rex Dieter wrote:
 Rahul Sundaram wrote:

   
  If Fedora is only usable for contributors and
 contributors only,
 
 It's called focus (where have I heard that?).  Some people(1) want 
 *contributors* to be focus is all.
   

How many contributors are interested in only serving themselves? Is that
what we want to encourage?

You cut off the portion where I already explained why such a policy is
inherently self defeating at large.   If the only way to use our
contributions in a good form is to use another distribution, then
contributors will go to *that* distribution instead.   How it would have
to work instead, is for us to create a system that has a large number of
users, where some of them (admittedly a very small percentage) will take
the next step to become contributors.  By losing users, you lose the
opportunity for that to even happen or atleast make it significantly
less likely.  

Rahul
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Mike McGrath

On Sun, 14 Mar 2010, Rex Dieter wrote:

 Rahul Sundaram wrote:

  On 03/14/2010 10:20 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
  Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
 
  So the right solution is to let you do your own disruptive changes in
  stable so you don't have to deal with other people disruptive changes in
  rawhide?
 
  My changes, or really KDE SIG's changes, are NOT disruptive.

  I am sorry but that has been proved to be not true multiple times in the
  past.

 proved?  Really?   Suffice to say that we may have to agree to disagree
 with on statement.


My last KDE update was disruptive as I mentioned earlier, in addition
though now my taskbar is freezing even after blowing my .kde dir away.
BZ on it's way soon as I can get some logs to send with it.

-Mike
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Frank Murphy wrote:
 Then why not change the way Fedora is presented in the release notes.
 (said in half jest yesterday, by myself)
 That to keep Fedora fully updated
 A highspeed internet connection is recommended

I've been recommending that all this time, I've been ignored. (In fact I 
think it is required, not just recommended.)

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Rahul Sundaram wrote:

 On 03/14/2010 10:13 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Not a very credible one, given that those users are happily using Fedora
 as it is now!
 
 Can we drop the absolutes which are clearly not true? Some users clearly
 are not.

Yet they haven't left over it. So why would that suddenly change?

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
 How many contributors are interested in only serving themselves? Is that
 what we want to encourage?

Contributors are what makes Fedora grow and advance as a project. Users are 
only benefitting from our (the contributors') work as a side effect.

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Simo Sorce wrote:
 Same here, and it is a pity, up to F-10 the number of updates was just
 fine, recently it has exploded to unsustainable levels for a *stable*
 release.

Huh? I didn't collect any stats on that, but I haven't noticed any 
difference in that area between F-10 (or F-9) and now.

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Ankur Sinha

On Sun, 2010-03-14 at 19:07 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Rahul Sundaram wrote:
  How many contributors are interested in only serving themselves? Is that
  what we want to encourage?
 
 Contributors are what makes Fedora grow and advance as a project. Users are 
 only benefitting from our (the contributors') work as a side effect.
 
 Kevin Kofler
 

hi,

I wouldn't refer to it as a side effect. Contributors sure do think of
benefits to themselves and yes, they certainly do make fedora grow. 

BUT

Users are an important part of the community and I'm certainly
interested in serving them to increase the Fedora user base. 

I wouldn't encourage the contributors work for themselves, users are
not important and should be happy with what they get attitude here. 

-- 
regards,

Ankur 
- FAS : ankursinha
- franciscod @ Freenode


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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Mathieu Bridon

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 19:07, Kevin Kofler kevin.kof...@chello.at wrote:
 Rahul Sundaram wrote:

 On 03/14/2010 10:13 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Not a very credible one, given that those users are happily using Fedora
 as it is now!

 Can we drop the absolutes which are clearly not true? Some users clearly
 are not.

 Yet they haven't left over it. So why would that suddenly change?

Some have.

Some others arrive and say hi, their first update (the 300MB one you
get when installing 2 months after release) breaks something, they
leave (some will not even finish downloading such a huge amount and
leave).

Finally, even long time users can grow tired of having to fiddle with
their system after an update, and leave, even if they haven't until
now.

In the help forums (at least the french ones, don't know about the
others), I've seen some users staying on Fn-1 (and actually always
upgrading to Fn-1 after Fn is released) because they think it will be
more stable. I've seen people leaving because they were sick of not
being able to use their computer but rather having to fix something
after each update.

Once every months, I install Fedora on some users system (recurring
release party the first saturday of each months) using the liveCD so I
can teach them how to do it themselves. After the install is finished,
we don't have time/bandwidth to apply the huge amount of updates that
were released between F12 GA and now, so I have to leave him with the
job half done. All I can do is tell him how to update and then pray
that his system won't be broken afterwards, because if it is, I'm sure
I won't ever have a chance to fix it for him next month.

Finally, I'm so tired of receiving phone calls from my mother saying «
I don't understand, today I switched the computer on and it doesn't
work anymore » that I'm actually considering moving her to CentOS 6
when it is released, even if that means that I'll voluntarily remove
her the chance to benefit from a modern desktop.

So yes, users *are* leaving Fedora because of those updates, and we
should at least try to do something.


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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Jon Masters wrote:
 I don't need to conduct extensive surveys to understand that no user is
 desperate to have the number of updates that are going out these days.

Nonsense. There ARE users who want this kind of updates. Please don't 
generalize your own opinion to ALL users in that way. no is a strong word!

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Mike McGrath

On Sun, 14 Mar 2010, Rex Dieter wrote:

 Mike McGrath wrote:

  My last KDE update was disruptive as I mentioned earlier, in addition
  though now my taskbar is freezing even after blowing my .kde dir away.
  BZ on it's way soon as I can get some logs to send with it.

 If you don't see the problem(s) with the conclusions you're trying to draw
 here, then this discussion is not going to get very far.


I stopped drawing conclusions on this list a while ago, I'm letting you
know the last kde update was disruptive.

-Mike
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Jon Masters

On Sun, 2010-03-14 at 18:17 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Jon Masters wrote:
  If the only reason to choose Fedora over Ubuntu is because Fedora shoves
  out updates at a higher pace into stable releases, then something is
  severely wrong.
 
 Why? It's exactly what's happening out there in the real world you chose to 
 ignore, yet I don't see anything wrong with it.

If you would confine your concerns to KDE, which it sounds is all you
are really worried about, then let's give KDE a giant exemption for KDE
updates if the rest of the distribution could benefit from less churn.

 If something regresses, there's always the old version to rollback to. If 
 the hardware is just not supported, there's nothing to fall back to.

People who have other things to do don't have time to keep several
different updates around, and do their own QA cycle on Fedora stable
updates, before deploying them. That's what rawhide is for - I know if
my rawhide breaks I'm not relying on it anyway so I can just fix it
later on, whenever. Honestly, it sounds like you're arguing against what
I see as the value of even having stable releases.

  This isn't Enterprise Linux. I don't need a support period covering the
  equivalent of 14 Fedora release cycles, I am fully happy with some
  considerable churn every 6 or 12 months on my desktop or laptop in the
  interest of being up to date with the latest tech, but I am not happy to
  have that churn be on a normal non-upgrade day when I expect my laptop
  to work (and an update just before a meeting to be safe with respect to
  that laptop running a presentation immediately afterward). Somewhat
  shockingly, some people do use Fedora for day to day stuff.
 
 Then do your updates AFTER that presentation, not before. Where's the 
 problem?

We seem to fundamentally disagree on quality expectations. My view is
that quality means being able to do an update at any time with a
reasonable expectation that nothing will blow up in the process. I think
you might be surprised at how many users also expect this when you label
something as an update and offer it to them in a popup balloon.

Jon.


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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Jon Masters wrote:
 If you would confine your concerns to KDE, which it sounds is all you
 are really worried about, then let's give KDE a giant exemption for KDE
 updates if the rest of the distribution could benefit from less churn.

It's not just about KDE. It's also about the kernel, about applications (the 
so-called leaf packages) etc.

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Jon Masters

On Sun, 2010-03-14 at 20:21 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Jon Masters wrote:
  If you would confine your concerns to KDE, which it sounds is all you
  are really worried about, then let's give KDE a giant exemption for KDE
  updates if the rest of the distribution could benefit from less churn.
 
 It's not just about KDE. It's also about the kernel, about applications (the 
 so-called leaf packages) etc.

It's just about KDE though isn't it :)

I'm done arguing now. We're just not going to agree. You keep pushing
for your rolling updates, and if you get your way I'll have to get a
second machine to test every update before I apply it to my others.

Jon.


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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Orion Poplawski

On 3/14/2010 10:50 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

 So the right solution is to let you do your own disruptive changes in
 stable so you don't have to deal with other people disruptive changes in
 rawhide?
  
 My changes, or really KDE SIG's changes, are NOT disruptive.

I fee that they have been for me.  I manage a small shop of some 20 or 
so linux users and every KDE update (even minor ones often) brings up 
some quirk that I have to track down or change that the user has to get 
used to.  Rarely disastrous, but annoying and distracting from other 
tasks.  Is this disruptive?
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Peter Boy

Am Sonntag, den 14.03.2010, 19:33 +0100 schrieb Mathieu Bridon:
 Some others arrive and say hi, their first update (the 300MB one you
 get when installing 2 months after release) breaks something, they
 leave (some will not even finish downloading such a huge amount and
 leave).
 
 Finally, even long time users can grow tired of having to fiddle with
 their system after an update, and leave, even if they haven't until
 now.

I'm really puzzled. 

The group which desires more stable releases heavily doubts the
reliability of Adams poll.

The same proponents heavily claim broken updates, one would have to
fix one's system after *each* update, ... (see above). 

I guess: We don't have any valid statistics about it, either!

(And given my personal experiences: There must be another distro named
Fedora around, which is updatable in most cases without any issues. I'll
try to find out, where I got my Fedora from ...)


Peter



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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Simo Sorce wrote:
 Because the situation worsened dramatically recently.

Where's the evidence for that? I haven't noticed anything like that at all! 
You (and others defending the same or a similar viewpoint) are quick to 
point out the lack of statistical rigor in Adam Williamson's poll, but where 
are your statistics backing the above claim?

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Rex Dieter

Peter Hutterer wrote:

 On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 09:14:48PM -0700, Orion Poplawski wrote:
 
 On Sat, March 13, 2010 4:58 pm, Peter Hutterer wrote:
  Isn't there a mere RISK to lose 70-80% of our users if we do _not_
  implement
  the changes as well? Especially given the chance that the poll did not
  represent a significant user sample?
 
 How many users do we need?
 
 sorry, I'm not sure I understand the question. Which user number are you
 referring to?

I'd venture he meant in response to your the poll did not represent a 
significant user sample comment.  So, how many users are needed to make it 
representative?

-- Rex

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Stephen John Smoogen

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 8:14 PM, Rex Dieter rdie...@math.unl.edu wrote:
 Peter Hutterer wrote:

 On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 09:14:48PM -0700, Orion Poplawski wrote:

 On Sat, March 13, 2010 4:58 pm, Peter Hutterer wrote:
  Isn't there a mere RISK to lose 70-80% of our users if we do _not_
  implement
  the changes as well? Especially given the chance that the poll did not
  represent a significant user sample?

 How many users do we need?

 sorry, I'm not sure I understand the question. Which user number are you
 referring to?

 I'd venture he meant in response to your the poll did not represent a
 significant user sample comment.  So, how many users are needed to make it
 representative?

Well you would want to poll a group that you knew had been active for
a while, and had some certainty that they were unique individuals. I
know several people who register 3-4 accounts on forums so that they
can vote more often or play games. I don't know how many people do
that but the risk usually makes these sorts of polls have lower
confidence levels to around 50%. [EG a statician looking at the data
would say that it is no more valid than flipping a coin.] This is NOT
to say that the poll end data is in the end wrong just that trying to
be more confident in the data (whether it was that Fast, Slow, or
Cowboy Bob) can not be determined. So if the data had shown that
people wanted conservative, I would hopefully be saying the same
things if people said it proved their point.

A more valid poll might be possible by the following method:

If we assumed that the people who had been registered in FAS for over
6 months and had signed the CLA met the first two definitions, you
would need to randomly select about 3000 of them and have at least 600
answer the poll to have (i think) a 90% confidence level in the poll.
I think the questions need to be simple yes/no ones to qualify for the
'easiest' tests, multiple choice results require something like
multiple asking worded slightly different or some such thing. Again
this is from a class I took 20 years ago so a real mathematician,
psychologist, etc would know better.

I also do not want to imply or say that this is wanted/possible etc.
There would be a whole range of issues that would have to get approval
or checked to see if assumptions were valid.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Ralf Corsepius

On 03/15/2010 01:40 AM, Simo Sorce wrote:
 On Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:07:53 +0100
 Kevin Koflerkevin.kof...@chello.at  wrote:

 Rahul Sundaram wrote:

 On 03/14/2010 10:13 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Not a very credible one, given that those users are happily using
 Fedora as it is now!

 Can we drop the absolutes which are clearly not true? Some users
 clearly are not.

 Yet they haven't left over it. So why would that suddenly change?

 Because the situation worsened dramatically recently.

Did it?

Your observation doesn't match with mine:
* There have always been prematurely shipped, immature and dysfunctional 
packages causing user-side malfunctions.
* The kernel has always not worked somewhere.
* KDE and perl packaging policies have not changed.
* There have always been broken package deps in updates.
* Fedora doesn't ship updated DVDs/CDs.
...

What has changed is
* the people in FPB and FESCO
* the number of packages in Fedora.
* the amount of bureaucracy.
* the packages being affected by instability.
...

Where I have to agree with you
* I am perceiving an increasing unwillingness of maintainers to fix 
bugs/defects/malfunctions of released packages.
* I am perceiving an increasingly low quality package submissions and of 
low quality package reviews.
...

Ralf


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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Peter Hutterer

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 09:14:06PM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
 Peter Hutterer wrote:
 
  On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 09:14:48PM -0700, Orion Poplawski wrote:
  
  On Sat, March 13, 2010 4:58 pm, Peter Hutterer wrote:
   Isn't there a mere RISK to lose 70-80% of our users if we do _not_
   implement
   the changes as well? Especially given the chance that the poll did not
   represent a significant user sample?
  
  How many users do we need?
  
  sorry, I'm not sure I understand the question. Which user number are you
  referring to?
 
 I'd venture he meant in response to your the poll did not represent a 
 significant user sample comment.  So, how many users are needed to make it 
 representative?

I don't know what the numbers are to make it significant. I'd probably be
happy with anything in the range of a couple of hundreds or more. Maybe
someone better versed in statistics can chime in here.

The tricky problem with this is that the pool the participants are chosen
from matters a lot. For example, if you go out on the street during the
soccer world championship finals and ask people what they think of soccer,
the results are likely to be skewed because most people that are really into
soccer will be at home watching the game (this is an analogy only and will
present some flaws in direct comparison to the issue at hand).

This skewing of results presents itself with any form of survey, whether it
be forums, mailing lists, irc, etc. Numbers are easy to get given our user
numbers. Chosing a good sample is what is much harder. And don't get me
wrong, I don't dispute the results of Adam's survey. My point is that we
need to be careful on the interpretation of data and be very conservative -
regardless of what the data actually says.
 
Cheers,
  Peter
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Bruno Wolff III

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 19:33:30 +0100,
  Mathieu Bridon boche...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
 
 Once every months, I install Fedora on some users system (recurring
 release party the first saturday of each months) using the liveCD so I
 can teach them how to do it themselves. After the install is finished,
 we don't have time/bandwidth to apply the huge amount of updates that
 were released between F12 GA and now, so I have to leave him with the
 job half done. All I can do is tell him how to update and then pray
 that his system won't be broken afterwards, because if it is, I'm sure
 I won't ever have a chance to fix it for him next month.

For events like this you might consider using custom spins or respins
done by Unity. It doesn't completely solve the problem, but it does prevent
an initial very large update.
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-14 Thread Orion Poplawski

On 3/14/2010 8:14 PM, Rex Dieter wrote:
 Peter Hutterer wrote:


 On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 09:14:48PM -0700, Orion Poplawski wrote:
  
 On Sat, March 13, 2010 4:58 pm, Peter Hutterer wrote:

 Isn't there a mere RISK to lose 70-80% of our users if we do _not_
 implement
 the changes as well? Especially given the chance that the poll did not
 represent a significant user sample?
  
 How many users do we need?

 sorry, I'm not sure I understand the question. Which user number are you
 referring to?
  
 I'd venture he meant in response to your the poll did not represent a
 significant user sample comment.  So, how many users are needed to make it
 representative?


No, I meant how many users does Fedora need to be a viable 
distribution?  Could we loose 70-80% (seems far fetched) of our user 
base and still be viable?   If we can, I don't really care how many 
users we loose as long as Fedora becomes more useful to me.  What 
concerns me most is retaining a large percentage of committed 
maintainers and community members, and that is a small enough number 
that I think we can poll effectively.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Adam Williamson

On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 21:43 -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

 Neither can be done without an outside/neutral polling agency
 contacting and getting responses from at least 600-3000 random Fedora
 users. The poll that was given was one that could be easily stuffed
 and not easily proven that it wasn't. Relying on the forum for data is
 bad science and makes this whole argument more and more farcical. I am

Again, when I'm trying to be a scientist, I'll be sure and let you know.
=) The poll wasn't intended to be a statistically valid indication of
the entire Fedora user base. For the record, I don't think it's
sufficiently strong to support the claims Kevin is trying to make it
support.

I don't think it was stuffed, though, for a couple of reasons. One, it
wasn't discussed anywhere outside the forums until over 100 votes were
in (and the percentages then were about the same as they are now). Two,
when a poll's being stuffed, you usually see a large amount of votes
arrive in a lump; I've been watching the vote counts for the poll, and
that hasn't happened, they've mostly dribbled in a few at a time.

BTW, it would be very difficult to take up your suggestion, as we don't
*have* a big list of All Fedora Users for the external polling agency to
generate a random list from. All the usable lists of Fedora-related
people we have probably suffer from some kind of selection bias. The
best would be the Smolt data, but of course that's not identifiable in
any way you could use to contact people.
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Adam Williamson

On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 07:55 +, Frank Murphy wrote:

 Then why not change the way Fedora is presented in the release notes.
 (said in half jest yesterday, by myself)
 That to keep Fedora fully updated
 A highspeed internet connection is recommended
 
 
 No, I'm not trying to help create a two-tier community.
 Just maybe thinking on something.

I don't think it'd make sense to do that until the present issue is
settled, and we have some hard numbers on the overall quantity of
updates shipped for Fedora 13 onwards. But at present, heck, it probably
wouldn't be wrong. The amount of updates shipped for F12 would be very
painful to download over a dial-up line, I think.
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Adam Williamson

On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 07:05 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

 As usual, a pragmatical solution/compromise would be inbetween.

This is the fallacy of the middle way. it's simply not always true. If I
say I'd like to steal $100 from you, and you'd prefer me not to steal
any of your money, is the 'obvious compromise' that I steal $50 the best
solution? Just a random example; point is, a compromise is never
automatically the right solution; it can go wrong because it doesn't
manage to capture the good point of either proposal, or because one
proposal is so wrong that it's still bad even if you only have half of
it. 

The second thing doesn't apply to this case, but the first certainly
could. It's not immediately obvious that a compromise between 'lots of
adventurous updates' and 'only conservative updates' would be the best
solution for anyone. After all, we sort of have a compromise right now -
some maintainers ship adventurous updates, some ship conservative - and
that doesn't seem to be making everyone happy.
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Nicolas Mailhot

Le samedi 13 mars 2010 à 06:50 +0100, Kevin Kofler a écrit :

 Rawhide is not the answer. It comes with disruptive changes (and there's no 
 real way to avoid this problem,

So the right solution is to let you do your own disruptive changes in
stable so you don't have to deal with other people disruptive changes in
rawhide?

In the end, despite your repeated claims to represent the Fedora way,
it seems to me your preferred way of operation relies heavily on your
group being almost the only one to follow it, and if others followed
your lead you wouldn't be so happy about it. And that stinks. Fedora
spent a lot of time removing those kinds of asymetric arrangements from
its workflow.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Ralf Corsepius

On 03/13/2010 09:54 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
 On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 07:05 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

 As usual, a pragmatical solution/compromise would be inbetween.

 This is the fallacy of the middle way. it's simply not always true.
I disagree: fanatical radicalism is naive and will always will always 
lead to failure.

 Just a random example; point is, a compromise is never
 automatically the right solution;
Right, a compromise is a compromise ... it will not taste everybody and 
will always be somewhat suboptimal wrt. some aspects ... such is life.

With regard to packaging:
* Backporting might be simple in some cases, but it might not be 
possible or uneffective in others.
* For some cases, preventive pushing packages is a suitable strategy 
to prevent security risks and bugs, in others this is not applicable.
* In some cases deliberately breaking SONAMEs is a tolerable policy, in
others it is not.
* Some distributions are suitable for some use-cases, but are not in others.
...

The key is to balance the trade-offs in individual cases.

Ralf
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Mary Ellen Foster

On 13 March 2010 01:46, Chris Adams cmad...@hiwaay.net wrote:
 Kevin, you are continually talking as if you represent a vast majority
 of all Fedora users and the Fedora project itself.  You say we do
 something, when you really mean the KDE SIG.  Please stop trying to
 speak for everybody else.

FWIW, not even necessarily all of the KDE SIG either ...

MEF

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Ralf Corsepius

On 03/12/2010 05:07 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
 On 03/12/2010 08:46 PM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

 This is extremely poor attitude Kevin and reeks of arrogance.  Talking
 down on users and contributors who don't have the privilege of high
 bandwidth connections isn't what I expected from you.  Nothing left to say.

 Fedora had never been usable on really low bandwidth from its first day
 on - Telling otherwise is simply not true.
 The past does not dictate the future even assuming this claim is true.

I know this is true from personal experience and I remember having told 
you so several before.

[I live in a DSL white spot in Germany and have been using Fedora over 
modem, ISDN and low bandwidth DSL for several years.]

 The reality is that we are hardly going to get a fairly small percentage of 
 free and open source apps in the Fedora repository assuming that we are 
 wildly successful and in reality, ABI breakages are going to cause problems 
 for many of our users including users with internal applications.  If someone 
 refuses to accept this reality and want to live in the ideal world where 
 everything is packaged and available in some repo, their solutions are not 
 going to work out well.  Acknowledging that we can do better would be a good 
 first step.  I am not saying that, ABI breakages should be avoided at all 
 cost (that holds true for EL as well) but we can make avoid some of more 
 gratuitous ones atleast.
I don't see any connection between this remark and using Fedora on low 
bandwidth system.

As I already said: The only option to use Fedora (or any other 
non-static distro - The same consideration applies to other distros, as 
well) with low bandwidth connectivity is applying package update 
filtering, being picky on update schedules and being picky about package 
selection.

That said, when I used to be restricted to bandwidth, I e.g. often opted 
to temporarily ignore certain updates (e.g. kernel, desktop or 
openoffice updates) and only applied those updates, of which I knew were 
having a direct impact on me.

Ralf
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Ville-Pekka Vainio

pe, 2010-03-12 kello 15:20 -0800, Jesse Keating kirjoitti:
 Keeping that cutting-edge release practice, but adding to that stability
 once released would indeed be a very unique and desirable niche for
 Fedora to fill.

I've avoided participating in these threads, since I don't really want
to feed a flame war, but now I'll mention that this is something I'd
like Fedora to be.

I mostly use and contribute to Fedora because it's an RPM/Red Hat style
distribution with a strong emphasis on community contributors, free
software and upstream.

As Fedora is the distribution I'm most familiar with, I've also
installed it on some of my family members' systems but lately I've been
considering switching those to Ubuntu once the new LTS release comes
out. I've taught these people how to update their systems, but I'm
always a bit worried that the adventurous updates are going to break
something they need to do their daily computing.

I have no problem with the new releases being leading edge, I actually
quite like that. I can always put the new release onto a USB stick and
test that the important stuff is working on a particular system before
upgrading, especially since I upgrade other people's systems about once
a year, when the old release becomes EOL. But I can't do this sort of
testing for the updates being pushed to the stable releases, so I'd like
to be able to trust those not to break things, at least to some extent.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Ralf Corsepius

On 03/13/2010 11:52 AM, Ville-Pekka Vainio wrote:
 pe, 2010-03-12 kello 15:20 -0800, Jesse Keating kirjoitti:

 As Fedora is the distribution I'm most familiar with, I've also
 installed it on some of my family members' systems but lately I've been
 considering switching those to Ubuntu once the new LTS release comes
 out.
You actually want a different distribution, likely a Fedora LTS, not 
current Fedora.

Unfortunately, Fedora's leadership repeatedly had brushed off a Fedora 
LTS as unmaintainable and redirected people to CentOS.

Ralf
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Haïkel Guémar

Le 13/03/2010 12:46, Ralf Corsepius a écrit :
 You actually want a different distribution, likely a Fedora LTS, not 
 current Fedora.
 
 Unfortunately, Fedora's leadership repeatedly had brushed off a Fedora 
 LTS as unmaintainable and redirected people to CentOS.
 
 Ralf

Our primary mission is to lead the advancement of free software at a
fast pace. Bring the best and the latest of free technologies to the
mass, that's what differences us from other distributions.

Enterprise Linux is the closest thing to a Fedora LTS, that's why EPEL
was created and maintained by Fedora Project.

Our infrastructure, our tools are freely available, if anyone want a
Fedora LTS, just start a SIG and work on it. If you can bring a
sustainable project, i highly doubt that Fedora leadership would veto it.

I don't buy the crap about leadership, Fedora is what its contributors
want it to be. If you dislike current leadership, vote for others
candidates or stand for the next election.

Fedora is already the upstream for Entreprise Linux, why it couldn't be
for a potential Fedora LTS ?

H.
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Andy Green

On 03/13/10 11:46, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
 On 03/13/2010 11:52 AM, Ville-Pekka Vainio wrote:
 pe, 2010-03-12 kello 15:20 -0800, Jesse Keating kirjoitti:

 As Fedora is the distribution I'm most familiar with, I've also
 installed it on some of my family members' systems but lately I've been
 considering switching those to Ubuntu once the new LTS release comes
 out.
 You actually want a different distribution, likely a Fedora LTS, not
 current Fedora.

 Unfortunately, Fedora's leadership repeatedly had brushed off a Fedora
 LTS as unmaintainable and redirected people to CentOS.

But they're right to say it's unmaintainable in the long term aren't 
they?  You said yourself in your impressive summary I agree with:

  * Backporting might be simple in some cases, but it might not be
  possible or uneffective in others.

What are people meant to do when they commit to stability in the sense 
of not uplevelling things and introducing new code, and then find that 
backporting is not possible or uneffective?  It's fair to imagine that 
the upstream and its lib dependencies' HEADs won't stay similar to 
whatever it is that was released in most cases just to make life easy. 
Then the workload is increasingly nontrivial or impossible as the 
codebases diverge.

Is the effort and personpower poured into trying to hold the line at 
some arbitrary release not in the end better poured into moving things 
forward and improving them?

I don't ask it idly or without understanding the value of stability at 
the end user, we will be shipping very large numbers of embedded devices 
where updates must not trash or damage the user experience.  I am just 
wondering if the focus on backport-based stability is in the end 
illusory and doomed.

-Andy
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Jon Masters

On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 19:56 -0600, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
 Jon Masters wrote:

  And prove your point that users are desperate for intrusive
  rolling updates and won't just use Rawhide instead if they want to get
  the very latest and greatest unbaked stuff.
 
 First off: I'm not asking for unbaked stuff.

If you can undermine months of testing by shoving things that have had
minimal soak time into a stable release, then you are asking for unbaked
stuff. It's really just that I believe no one person is capable of
replacing the collective efforts of weeks or months of testing.

 Fourth I submit that your question is flawed and that we don't 
 currently, *generally* have intrusive rolling updates. I have yet to 
 be hit by an update I consider intrusive. (Even the /few/ bugs I can 
 think of that came from updates I wouldn't classify as intrusive).

An update is intrusive if it changes expected and documented behavior
users are relying on in that release. This can be anything from plugging
your laptop into a projector and finding you can no longer display video
onto a screen, to having menu items move around without warning. I have
this crazy notion that what my laptop does today, it should do tomorrow,
exactly as it did today, unless I choose to upgrade the entire release.

How can you possibly know, when you ship some innocuous giant update,
that there isn't some regression introduced in there somewhere that
really annoys existing users of the software? Answer: you can't. Even
very large QA teams can miss things, and Fedora doesn't have anything
like the kind of resources to offer that kind of testing. You can't test
every situation that the software is being used under, can't know that
laptop user X now has no ability to do whatever they did yesterday. It
works for *you*, and you are not intentionally malicious, but that is of
little comfort when updates go breaking things that were working fine.

So, rather than say don't change anything, for the love of all things
good, please just keep the intrusive massive churn to rawhide. Let users
have the new wonderful unbaked features in 6 months when they've been
tested by experienced developers running rawhide systems, and when the
user has set aside time specifically to upgrade to the latest software.

  And while you're at it, why not tell us why people who want to update
  constantly aren't just running Gentoo or some other compile from source
  distribution?
 
 Because having to compile all your own stuff constantly is a colossal pain?

Dealing with the number of Fedora updates getting shoved out to
unsuspecting users is a bigger pain. I don't even bother to update my
system daily now because I know I may need to schedule some time to fix
something when I do upgrade. It feels worse than rawhide because it's
expected to be stable. This is not what any user wants to have. I
don't need to conduct extensive surveys to understand that no user is
desperate to have the number of updates that are going out these days.

Jon.


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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Stephen John Smoogen

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 10:44 PM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kof...@chello.at wrote:
 Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
 Here is where we have a definition problem. To me, unbaked stuff is
 things that haven't had a good month of testing if its a large change
 (a couple of days if its a small one).

 If you count all the testing done on prereleases, KDE 4.4.0 actually had
 much MORE than a month of testing before being pushed. Even if you count
 only the stable release, it got more than 2 weeks of total testing before
 the stable push. But the changes between the RCs and the final were fairly
 small.

 So please don't overgeneralize claiming all the feature updates which are
 getting pushed are unbaked.

Kevin, I am only going to respond once because it is clear you don't
really read, you just shoot from your hip and you have not a single
iota of compromise.

You just inferred a whole lot into my post. I never said anything
about KDE in this post. I don't use it enough to be able to talk about
it. I gave a definition of what I thought unbaked was... nothing more,
nothing less.

I am done trying to have a conversation here... *plunk*


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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Stephen John Smoogen

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 1:45 AM, Adam Williamson awill...@redhat.com wrote:
 On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 21:43 -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

 Neither can be done without an outside/neutral polling agency
 contacting and getting responses from at least 600-3000 random Fedora
 users. The poll that was given was one that could be easily stuffed
 and not easily proven that it wasn't. Relying on the forum for data is
 bad science and makes this whole argument more and more farcical. I am

 Again, when I'm trying to be a scientist, I'll be sure and let you know.
 =) The poll wasn't intended to be a statistically valid indication of
 the entire Fedora user base. For the record, I don't think it's
 sufficiently strong to support the claims Kevin is trying to make it
 support.

My sincere apologies Adam, I was not trying to make you into the
villian of this, and probably should have worded things differently.

The poll was done in a sincere effort to get information. And some
sort of poll is needed to start seeing what questions need to be
asked. However an initial poll like this only has a confidence level
of around 50% and no ability to do confidence levels (+/-X amount you
see on various polls in the news)

The results from it have been parlayed as facts; when in the end, they
are just a viewpoint of a select view of people (those who register on
the forum, use the forum regularly,etc ), and because of the nature of
the forum it is hard to determine how much validity there is in the
testing. Even if it was not stuffed, the uncertainty of the tool makes
it so that if say the slower updates had been 70% of the population,
the other side would claim it wasn't a valid test (and vice versa).

 I don't think it was stuffed, though, for a couple of reasons. One, it
 wasn't discussed anywhere outside the forums until over 100 votes were
 in (and the percentages then were about the same as they are now). Two,
 when a poll's being stuffed, you usually see a large amount of votes
 arrive in a lump; I've been watching the vote counts for the poll, and
 that hasn't happened, they've mostly dribbled in a few at a time.

 BTW, it would be very difficult to take up your suggestion, as we don't
 *have* a big list of All Fedora Users for the external polling agency to

No we would have to determine it from FAS... probably using the group
CLA and been a member for over X time. You would then poll through
them sending a directed email to a random set and point them to a
closed poll. After the poll had been validated you would then announce
the results (or announce that it had failed validty tests).

While the FAS+CLA is a self selected group, it is representative of
the developers of the group which would fit into the population that
both groups seem to be thinking they talk for :).

 generate a random list from. All the usable lists of Fedora-related
 people we have probably suffer from some kind of selection bias. The
 best would be the Smolt data, but of course that's not identifiable in
 any way you could use to contact people.
 --
 Adam Williamson
 Fedora QA Community Monkey
 IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
 http://www.happyassassin.net

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Simo Sorce

On Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:27:00 -0500
Jon Masters jonat...@jonmasters.org wrote:

 Dealing with the number of Fedora updates getting shoved out to
 unsuspecting users is a bigger pain. I don't even bother to update my
 system daily now because I know I may need to schedule some time to
 fix something when I do upgrade. It feels worse than rawhide because
 it's expected to be stable. This is not what any user wants to
 have. I don't need to conduct extensive surveys to understand that no
 user is desperate to have the number of updates that are going out
 these days.

Same here, and it is a pity, up to F-10 the number of updates was just
fine, recently it has exploded to unsustainable levels for a *stable*
release.

Simo.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Jaroslav Reznik

On Friday 12 March 2010 04:54:43 pm Jesse Keating wrote:
 On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 14:56 +0100, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
  How does this proposal go with upgrades? I think stable updates +
  upgrades are tight together. Are we going to be more conservative in new
  releases too? Extend stable release life time? LTS?
 
 Fedora needs to be free to innovate, and that means we need to be free
 to introduce substantial changes between our releases, so no, this
 policy does not apply to changes between say F-13 and F-14, only to
 changes /to/ F-13 once it has been released.

But this is real issue - very conservative release updates with very 
aggressive upgrades every 6 months, forcing users to upgrade every (and only) 
1 year. You can't decouple updates/upgrades. That's why I'd like to see 
slowing down approach of updates.

Jaroslav
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 12:18 AM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@redhat.com wrote:
 On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 16:05 -0600, Matthew Woehlke wrote:

 I'd expect people that want 100% Free to use gNewSense. I'm not sure how
 you define more ammeniable to new contributors, so that's harder to
 address. Still, I think it's clear that at least some people use Fedora
 *because* it is leading (yes, almost bleeding) edge.

 And this is going to kill that. (Or will if it gets enforced.)

 Fedora can still be (b)leading edge in the technologies it picks up for
 its releases.  At the same time it can retain stability after the
 release has been released.  Every 6 months, a new bleeding edge release
 picking up all the kinds of things Fedora is the first to integrate.

 Stop trying to drag rawhide into our releases.

Could you explain to me, what makes Fedora exactly more leading edge
if we use a X-server beta that would fit better into rawhide then in a
release

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 9:15 PM, Thomas Janssen
thom...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
 On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 12:18 AM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@redhat.com wrote:
 On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 16:05 -0600, Matthew Woehlke wrote:

 I'd expect people that want 100% Free to use gNewSense. I'm not sure how
 you define more ammeniable to new contributors, so that's harder to
 address. Still, I think it's clear that at least some people use Fedora
 *because* it is leading (yes, almost bleeding) edge.

 And this is going to kill that. (Or will if it gets enforced.)

 Fedora can still be (b)leading edge in the technologies it picks up for
 its releases.  At the same time it can retain stability after the
 release has been released.  Every 6 months, a new bleeding edge release
 picking up all the kinds of things Fedora is the first to integrate.

 Stop trying to drag rawhide into our releases.

 Could you explain to me, what makes Fedora exactly more leading edge
 if we use a X-server beta that would fit better into rawhide then in a
 release

Wasn't ready with wording and clicked 'send' instead of 'discard' sorry.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 1:02 AM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@redhat.com wrote:
 On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 00:52 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Jesse Keating wrote:
  Fundamental point of view difference.  You take the point of view of
  push everything all the time /unless/ there is a good enough reason not
  to.
 
  Others take the point of view of not updating anything unless there is a
  good enough reason /to/.

 Right. Fundamental point of view difference indeed. But the former is the
 point of view many of our users defend, too. :-) See e.g. the results of
 Adam Williamson's poll.

         Kevin Kofler


 s/many/some/.  We have absolutely no scientific data that demonstrates
 what any measure of our userbase defend or don't defend.  What we have
 is data that /some/ users prefer lots and lots of updates.  We also have
 data that /some/ users prefer a more conservative approach to updates to
 our stable releases.  We also have a vision statement from the Fedora
 Board that reads to me like a vision for conservative updates to our
 stable release.

 While it's true that some of our users appreciate the rapid stream of
 updates, we may have to lose those users, or redirect them to other
 avenues to rapid updates within the Fedora project and release stream.

Well, you fight since a long time for this, at least 2007. Could be
dangerous to play with that fire. Let that part of our users go
(anyways, if they have to use rawhide they can also leave, there are
better/more stable alternatives out there) and dream of catching some
of the other distro users. We have some of the best users out there.
testing stuff, file bug reports, dont cry around much if something
breaks *and* still using Fedora. And you want to give away all that
for some distro hoppers? Wow.

Why, do you think, should just a single user change to Fedora, away
from Ubuntu or any other Distro? Because we're blue? Or because we do
the same just in RPM? Some slow-it-down-people do really think that
a half baken X-server 1.7beta will make users of other distros go away
because they use just 1.6, or our release kernel is 2.6.31.3 and
others have 2.6.31.1 trough release-time?

Sorry, but everyone thinking that Fedora's leading edge is because of
broken/half baked techs trough release time, should use some of the
other distros just to become familiar of what he's talking of.
Other distros have even all the brand new stuff as we have, just in a
lot of third-party repos. Sometimes even with dependency hell.
That's something Fedora doesn't have (well maybe in some very rare
cases). We update that stuff trough our reliable repos. But this will
change soon if you play to hard. We might see a wild garden of repos
with deps hell out there. This somehow reminds to something.. Man, my
Alzheimer's disease hurts me sometimes..

You will never get a single user of the other distros if you dont have
anything special to offer. That's basic stuff you have to know in
every company. Be special, or be nothing. I really, really dont
understand why some people try extremely hard to train wreck Fedora.
And nobody is able to explain it.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 8:55 AM, Frank Murphy frankl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 12/03/10 19:27, Adam Williamson wrote:
 --snipped--

 Bringing it back to dialup.
 Fedora liveCD 500-700mb
 CentOS DVD 3.5GB app.
 Fedora 1, CentOS 0

 In my experience, many users with restricted bandwidth actually prefer a
 *larger* install image, as then they at least have a databank of
 software available without an internet connection.

 I bow to your experience.

 They will often
 acquire a DVD image from someone with a faster connection, or just by
 buying a DVD through the post or whatever, and then they can install
 most everything they need without using the internet connection. This is
 not possible with the restricted range of software available on the live
 image.


 Then why not change the way Fedora is presented in the release notes.
 (said in half jest yesterday, by myself)
 That to keep Fedora fully updated
 A highspeed internet connection is recommended

Yes, why not. Sounds absolutely fair play to me.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-13 Thread Peter Hutterer

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 03:20:02AM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Chris Adams wrote:
  Right after you _prove_ that this IS the case.  How quick would you be
  to reject that poll as unscientific and meaningless if it didn't go your
  way?  I thought it was a bad idea and didn't even take a look.  How
  widespread was the poll among regular users (not developers)?
 
 There is no need to prove it: The mere RISK of losing 70-80% of our users 
 (which is exactly what is going to happen if the poll happens to be 
 representative, but those changes get implemented anyway) is a risk not to 
 be taken lightly.

Isn't there a mere RISK to lose 70-80% of our users if we do _not_ implement
the changes as well? Especially given the chance that the poll did not
represent a significant user sample?

Without having accurate numbers, it's hard to tell. As Adam pointed out
elsewhere, the numbers only show that these users _exist_, they cannot
possibly specify a quantity in terms of overall users.

That aside, the flow of users isn't unidirectional. Regardless what policy
is implemented, Fedora will lose some users. The question how many users may
be _gained_ by implementing a certain policy should also be asked.
And that's a question that is independent of what policy ends up being
chosen.

Cheers,
  Peter
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Terry Barnaby

On 12/03/10 03:42, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Chris Adams wrote:
 There's a difference between not supporting third-party software (is
 that actually documented somewhere or another Kevin Kofler rule?) and
 intentionally breaking it.

 There's no policy saying we support it, ergo by default, we don't.

 And we don't intentionally break it, we upgrade a library for some good
 reason (there's always a good reason why a soname bump gets pushed) and that
 happens to break some third-party software we don't and can't know about.
 (When we do, e.g. for software in RPM Fusion, we alert the affected
 maintainers so they can rebuild their packages.)

 For example, Firefox security updates are impossible to do without ABI
 breaks in xulrunner.

  Kevin Kofler

I really strongly disagree that ABI interfaces of the mainly used
shared libraries could be allowed to change in a stable release.
We develop internal applications that are packaged and go out to a few
users. We use Fedora primarily as an OS to run applications we need
rather than an experimentation platform.
I consider it unacceptable for a system update to break the
ABI for these and any other third-party packages. It would mean failures
in the field that would require live intervention. This is what
rawhide is for.
We would end up by turning off Fedora updating on these systems and in
effect manage the updates of the system ourselves probably from our own
repository (our own Fedora spin) or, probably move to a different system.
I am sure a lot of users, like us, use Fedora for there own purposes and
develop there own applications for it, but do not maintain them in the
main Fedora package tree. There's more to Fedora than just the main Fedora
repository...

Terry
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Rahul Sundaram

On 03/12/2010 01:12 PM, Matěj Cepl wrote:
 Dne 12.3.2010 02:24, Rahul Sundaram napsal(a):
   
 I disagree.  Imagining that we are living in a island where no software
 exists outside the repository is just delusional and the assumption that
 everyone has the bandwidth to deal with all that churn is wrong as
 well.  I should make people sit in a dial-up connection and have them
 update software now and then to bring them back to the ground.
 
 Rahul, I used Debian, I know Debian, Debian was a friend of mine. I 
 don't want Fedora to be just yet another copycat of Debian. Please keep 
 it Fedora instead.
   

Caring about ABI stability a bit more does not make Fedora, Debian or
vice versa. There are lots of other differences.

Rahul
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Christof Damian

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 20:12, Chris Adams cmad...@hiwaay.net wrote:
 Why not handle those cases similar to how GNOME and Firefox (and IIRC
 OpenOffice.org?) have been handled in the past, where a test/RC release
 was in Fedora leading up to the Fedora release, and the final upstream
 release is pushed as an update (if/when needed)?  Going from test/RC to
 final usuaully isn't going to involve major changes (soname bumps, UI
 changes, etc.) and so should be an acceptable update to everybody.

I think that this is the wrong way to go. Whenever this happened there
were a lot of complains from the users and sometimes from upstream.

It basically says we make the releases less stable by using a not
fully tested and finished upstream version, just so that we can have
more stable updates.

I like the idea of stable updates and just tracking upstream in
rawhide, but lets start to make the Fedora releases more stable first.
Otherwise everyone will push the newest broken alpha into rawhide just
before release, in the hope to patch it up with stable updates
afterwards.

A six month cycle is not a long time and having test/beta/RC versions
in there just for marketing doesn't make sense.

Christof
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Andrew Haley

On 03/11/2010 11:36 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
 Once upon a time, Kevin Kofler kevin.kof...@chello.at said:
 Matthew Garrett wrote:
 If a user has built an application against a library, it's not
 especially reasonable to then break that application by bumping a soname
 in a stable release.

 If the application is in Fedora as all applications eventually ought to be, 
 we will take care of rebuilding it. Otherwise, whoever built it (some third-
 party repository or the user him/herself) is responsible for rebuilding it. 
 This has always worked fine, I don't see the problem.
 
 What about somebody developing on their own computer?  Having to rebuild
 because you (or possibly somebody else, if a system has a dedicated
 admin) loaded an update is highly irritating.

It's a disaster if you're relying on a third-party compiled program
for your Internet connectivity.  Imagine it: one morning you update,
then the connection breaks, then you can't get to the Internet to find
out how to get things working again.

Andrew.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Rahul Sundaram

On 03/12/2010 04:36 PM, Thomas Janssen wrote:

 And i disagree here. People like that have to face that Fedora or any
 similar distro isn't for them.
   

I don't see why you want to continue pushing off users instead of
working out a method that satisfies more users.  Breaking ABI stability
gratuitously as has been done in the destabilises the platform and
causes unnecessary churn. 

 If they live in dial-up-land, they should use something like RHEL,
 CentOS, Debian stable or whatever.
 OR they learn to read documentation, understand the packagemanagement
 and how to update only security fixes.
   

Have you tried sticking to security updates only?  If you have done
that, you will know that it still doesn't save up much because updates
often pile up.  The way it is done within Fedora, security fixes are
often new major upstream versions that suck in a lot of the enhancement
updates as dependencies.

Rahul
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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:09 PM, Rahul Sundaram methe...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 03/12/2010 04:36 PM, Thomas Janssen wrote:

 And i disagree here. People like that have to face that Fedora or any
 similar distro isn't for them.


 I don't see why you want to continue pushing off users instead of
 working out a method that satisfies more users.  Breaking ABI stability
 gratuitously as has been done in the destabilises the platform and
 causes unnecessary churn.

I wasn't answering the ABI stability part. But the people-in-dial-up-land part.
I do understand both sides at the ABI breaking discussion.

 If they live in dial-up-land, they should use something like RHEL,
 CentOS, Debian stable or whatever.
 OR they learn to read documentation, understand the packagemanagement
 and how to update only security fixes.


 Have you tried sticking to security updates only?  If you have done
 that, you will know that it still doesn't save up much because updates
 often pile up.  The way it is done within Fedora, security fixes are
 often new major upstream versions that suck in a lot of the enhancement
 updates as dependencies.

Not every time, but can happen yes. That's why i wrote, people have to
face that and use what fits their needs.
I have read all this mega-threads and i haven't found just a single
argument why it's good for Fedora to change away from what we are.

I do think some people really need to learn that testing updates is
essential and badly needed. Though that's nothing to explain the make
Fedora more like RHEL discussions. And now with the Boards vision it
will be.

So to be honest i can't see any reason why people still fight. It's
over from my POV. What will happen with Fedora, *shrugs*, we will see.

If you ask yourself why i answered on your post in the first place,
it's because i can't believe that dial-up-land user are really that
stubborn and use Fedora (and even worse try to change it) instead of
using what fits their needs. Sorry if 'stupid' hurts someones
feelings, but that's what i think about it.

Next time i buy a car, i will buy one who gets upgrades on a regular
base, but hard for me to get it in my country. I will then complain
and cry until they start to support me well. Sure i could buy a
different car that's older and needs just a bit oil from time to time,
but hey, this is a free world, i can change anything.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On 12/03/10 11:33, Thomas Janssen wrote:
-snipped--

If I can be indulged.


 it's because i can't believe that dial-up-land user are really that
 stubborn

It's not the endusers fault,
they have bad infracture.

and use Fedora
Because that is what they want.

  (and even worse try to change it)
They also want to learn,
maybe eventually be in a position
to give back to the Fedora Community,
and floss in general.


  instead of
 using what fits their needs.

Maybe Fedora is what fits their needs?


 Next time i buy a car, i will buy one who gets upgrades on a regular
 base, but hard for me to get it in my country. I will then complain
 and cry until they start to support me well.
  Sure i could buy a
 different car that's older and needs just a bit oil from time to time,
 but hey, this is a free world, i can change anything.


Apples and Oranges.



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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Frank Murphy frankl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 12/03/10 11:33, Thomas Janssen wrote:
 -snipped--

 If I can be indulged.

 it's because i can't believe that dial-up-land user are really that
 stubborn

 It's not the endusers fault,
 they have bad infracture.

Oh, so it's our fault?

 and use Fedora
 Because that is what they want.

I want a lot myself. Doesn't mean i can have everything. But i can
choose, as can they.

  (and even worse try to change it)
 They also want to learn,
 maybe eventually be in a position
 to give back to the Fedora Community,
 and floss in general.

They can give back with any other distro as well, that fits their needs better.

  instead of
 using what fits their needs.

 Maybe Fedora is what fits their needs?

Obviously not.

 Next time i buy a car, i will buy one who gets upgrades on a regular
 base, but hard for me to get it in my country. I will then complain
 and cry until they start to support me well.
  Sure i could buy a
 different car that's older and needs just a bit oil from time to time,
 but hey, this is a free world, i can change anything.


 Apples and Oranges.

Nope, just a perfect example not software related.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On 12/03/10 11:56, Thomas Janssen wrote:
 On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Frank Murphyfrankl...@gmail.com  wrote:
 On 12/03/10 11:33, Thomas Janssen wrote:
 -snipped--

 If I can be indulged.

 it's because i can't believe that dial-up-land user are really that
 stubborn

 It's not the endusers fault,
 they have bad infracture.

 Oh, so it's our fault?

It's just life, in all it's forms.


 and use Fedora
 Because that is what they want.

 I want a lot myself. Doesn't mean i can have everything. But i can
 choose, as can they.

They have, Fedora



   (and even worse try to change it)
 They also want to learn,
 maybe eventually be in a position
 to give back to the Fedora Community,
 and floss in general.

 They can give back with any other distro as well,

True.

that fits their needs better.

So you say.



   instead of
 using what fits their needs.

 Maybe Fedora is what fits their needs?

 Obviously not.

You can't make that call for them.

That is not, you are not intitled to voice your concerns,



 Next time i buy a car, i will buy one who gets upgrades on a regular
 base, but hard for me to get it in my country. I will then complain
 and cry until they start to support me well.
   Sure i could buy a
 different car that's older and needs just a bit oil from time to time,
 but hey, this is a free world, i can change anything.


 Apples and Oranges.

 Nope, just a perfect example not software related.

Except when you need to drive the Nullabor.
You wish you had the upgradeable car.


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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On 12/03/10 12:04, Frank Murphy wrote:
--snipped--
 That is not, you are not intitled to voice your concerns,

s /That is not to say, you are not intitled to voice your concerns,


---snipped-


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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 1:04 PM, Frank Murphy frankl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 12/03/10 11:56, Thomas Janssen wrote:
 On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Frank Murphyfrankl...@gmail.com  wrote:
 On 12/03/10 11:33, Thomas Janssen wrote:
 -snipped--

 If I can be indulged.

 it's because i can't believe that dial-up-land user are really that
 stubborn

 It's not the endusers fault,
 they have bad infracture.

 Oh, so it's our fault?

 It's just life, in all it's forms.

Exactly. And if i live in an area where i cant have everything, i
can't choose everything.


 and use Fedora
 Because that is what they want.

 I want a lot myself. Doesn't mean i can have everything. But i can
 choose, as can they.

 They have, Fedora

Perfectly, so why do they complain then?

   (and even worse try to change it)
 They also want to learn,
 maybe eventually be in a position
 to give back to the Fedora Community,
 and floss in general.

 They can give back with any other distro as well,

 True.

 that fits their needs better.

 So you say.

Well, all that complaining in this meag-threads makes it obvious that
Fedora doesn't fit their needs, don't you think ;)

   instead of
 using what fits their needs.

 Maybe Fedora is what fits their needs?

 Obviously not.

 You can't make that call for them.

See above.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Rahul Sundaram

On 03/12/2010 05:03 PM, Thomas Janssen wrote:

 I wasn't answering the ABI stability part. But the people-in-dial-up-land 
 part.
   

It is interconnected in my argument and doesn't make sense to debate in
parts.  If you avoid breaking ABI stability, you can avoid unnecessary
churn and one of the benefits ( think resource cost - infrastructure,
mirrors etc)  of that is users with low bandwidth systems being able to
take advantage of Fedora more.  While you can always brush off any
suggestion with a position of take it or leave it, it is importance to
recognize that there is room for improvement.If we didn't care about
people with low bandwidth systems, we wouldn't be having yum-presto and
LZMA compressed RPMS  So claiming that users with such systems should
just go away doesn't fit into the development efforts already made to
accommodate such users.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Andy Green

On 03/12/10 00:45, Somebody in the thread at some point said:

 If you are the user, then you should not be compiling software. :-) You
 should be using some repository and that repository is responsible for
 rebuilding the package.

I tend to agree with what you have been writing but this seems wrong.

I don't think I'm the only person who is using Fedora as a basis for 
homegrown apps, if what I want isn't in Fedora (because I am creating it 
locally) then I certainly will compile software as a Fedora user and 
the case must be considered.

However I agree this isn't a real issue, the packages with the homegrown 
apps should choke the yum update because they see the lib versions they 
depend on would go away, so nothing breaks.

Then the pressure is on the homegrown software guy to uplevel which will 
normally be a turnkey rebuild into a repo yum knows about and this seems 
acceptable to me.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On 12/03/10 12:12, Thomas Janssen wrote:
--sniped--

Oh, so it's our fault?

It's just life, in all it's forms.

Exactly. And if i live in an area where i cant have everything, i
can't choose everything.

Bringing it back to dialup.
Fedora liveCD 500-700mb
CentOS DVD 3.5GB app.
Fedora 1, CentOS 0

and use Fedora
Because that is what they want.

I want a lot myself. Doesn't mean i can have everything. But i can
choose, as can they.

They have, Fedora

Perfectly, so why do they complain then?

They are doing the best with what they have.

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f12/en-US/html-single/#sect-Release_Notes-Welcome_to_Fedora;

Should we ask the community, to change our community focus:

Fedora is a community of people, who come from well developed
lifestyles. Have access to high-speed internet, do not download,
or feel you belong unless this is satisfied.

(and even worse try to change it)
They also want to learn,
maybe eventually be in a position
to give back to the Fedora Community,
and floss in general.

They can give back with any other distro as well,

True.

that fits their needs better.

So you say.

Well, all that complaining in this meag-threads makes it obvious that
Fedora doesn't fit their needs, don't you think ;)

What doesn't fit their need is the infracstruture,
not the distro.

instead of
using what fits their needs.

Maybe Fedora is what fits their needs?

Obviously not.

You can't make that call for them.

See above.

I did.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 1:17 PM, Rahul Sundaram methe...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 03/12/2010 05:03 PM, Thomas Janssen wrote:

 I wasn't answering the ABI stability part. But the people-in-dial-up-land 
 part.


 It is interconnected in my argument and doesn't make sense to debate in
 parts.  If you avoid breaking ABI stability, you can avoid unnecessary
 churn and one of the benefits ( think resource cost - infrastructure,
 mirrors etc)  of that is users with low bandwidth systems being able to
 take advantage of Fedora more.  While you can always brush off any
 suggestion with a position of take it or leave it, it is importance to
 recognize that there is room for improvement.    If we didn't care about
 people with low bandwidth systems, we wouldn't be having yum-presto and
 LZMA compressed RPMS  So claiming that users with such systems should
 just go away doesn't fit into the development efforts already made to
 accommodate such users.

I agree there's room for improvement.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 1:26 PM, Frank Murphy frankl...@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/03/10 12:12, Thomas Janssen wrote:
--sniped--

Oh, so it's our fault?

It's just life, in all it's forms.

Exactly. And if i live in an area where i cant have everything, i
can't choose everything.

Bringing it back to dialup.
Fedora liveCD 500-700mb
CentOS DVD 3.5GB app.
Fedora 1, CentOS 0

CentOS was just an example, i'm can't tell if CentOS has a
netinstall.iso. If not, would be a improvement.
Other distros have for sure. Such distros with very low updates.

and use Fedora
Because that is what they want.

I want a lot myself. Doesn't mean i can have everything. But i can
choose, as can they.

They have, Fedora

Perfectly, so why do they complain then?

They are doing the best with what they have.

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f12/en-US/html-single/#sect-Release_Notes-Welcome_to_Fedora;

Should we ask the community, to change our community focus:

Fedora is a community of people, who come from well developed
lifestyles. Have access to high-speed internet, do not download,
or feel you belong unless this is satisfied.

I like that you said *ask*. What happens right now with our community?
Do they feel like they are asked? No. People who think they know what
our users want, deciding right now that Fedora will change into. Yes,
i wrote *think they know*. They don't know, they just guess. It seems
they guess because *they* want it like that. Even a poll (yes i have
read all the posts if the poll is good or bad) has shown, that our
users want's something different that those decider guess.

(and even worse try to change it)
They also want to learn,
maybe eventually be in a position
to give back to the Fedora Community,
and floss in general.

They can give back with any other distro as well,

True.

that fits their needs better.

So you say.

Well, all that complaining in this meag-threads makes it obvious that
Fedora doesn't fit their needs, don't you think ;)

What doesn't fit their need is the infracstruture,
not the distro.

I guess you mean their infrastructure. Well, since they can't change
their infra, they want us to change into something that fits their
infra instead of choose something that fits already into their infra.

Look, it's not like i can't understand your point. Though we're
spinning around in circles and there's not one argument *why*, should
we change. There are lots of distros out there, exactly fulfilling
those needs. Why kill something beautiful like Fedora just to be
another such distro. Nobody really needs that.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Orcan Ogetbil

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Chris Adams wrote:

 You'd be looking at a typical peak of around 5 months between upstream
 release and Fedora release, with an average of more like 2-3 months,
 which is a lot different from the 6 months that keeps being repeated as
 the waiting time for something new.


I don't think this calculation is right. Assuming the conservative
updates perception, we can't have a drastic change in F-13 right now.
A drastic change will have to wait until F-14, which is in November.
So the peak time as of now is 8 months. I think 6 months is a
reasonably good estimate for an average.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Jaroslav Reznik

On Thursday 11 March 2010 09:59:46 pm Simo Sorce wrote:
 On Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:56:05 -0500
 
 Konstantin Ryabitsev i...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
  (And if the answer is backport the security fixes to 1.8.1 then I'm
  afraid I don't really have the skills nor have the time to spend on
  such massive effort).
 
 You can always find a co-maintainer skilled enough to help you in such
 rare cases... just saying.

Backporting could be very dangerous, actually I think it can bring much more 
regressions. And sometimes it's not even possible. If you want strict policy 
for Fedora, then you need same strict policies for upstream ;-)

Jaroslav

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Kamil Paral

- Jesse Keating jkeat...@redhat.com wrote:

 On Thu, 2010-03-11 at 12:21 -0600, Matt Domsch wrote:
  Paul: Jesse Keating provided a draft policy for what updates should
 be
  done.  Board will take this into consideration, if necessary, in
  another round of discussions (not this meeting).
 
 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Stable_Release_Updates_Proposal
 
 Here is the link.  I'm going to start a new thread here.
 
 Feedback welcome.

Jesse, thank you very much for your proposal. I believe it is
an important piece to our Updates Policy puzzle.

Generally I really like the proposal. A few comments:

1. In order not to have to reference Fedora Audience in the
mailing list archive [1] all the time, I created a new wiki
page Fedora Audience with the relevant content [2]. It
seems to me this is too important to have it just in some
mailing list archive.

2. Both users of the updates and maintainers of packages 
which might need to be rebuilt for your update.
I don't really understand this sentence, I suppose some
words are missing.

3. Bugs which prevent software from working with external
data / service providers
I'm very glad you provided this option in the proposal.
But maybe it would deserve a few examples. I understand
this like:
* Pidgin MSN support stopped working because of MSN protocol
change - Pidgin may be updated.
* Samba didn't work for anonymous logins - It may be
updated.
But I may be wrong, that's why a little clarification
would come handy. External data means exactly what?

4. Regular Data Updates
It should be specified whether the regularity of
update releases is also a requirement or not. Antivirus
definitions may be updated every week/day or so. OTOH
e.g. country codes definitions may be updated very 
irregularly, but still I would consider it part of
this category. Is regular release schedule also a
requirement?

5. Targeted Application Updates
Critical infrastructure packages should certainly
be more thoroughly defined. I suppose you intend to
do it in future.

6. New Upstream Versions
For new upstream versions of packages which provide
new features, but don't just fix critical bugs, an 
update can still be issued, but it is vital that the
new upstream version does not regress or drastically
change a user's experience.
From the sentence it is not clear if this category
can be used only for upstream versions that *fix
critical bugs AND provide new features*, or *just
provide new features*.
If the latter is the case, then I not quite
understand the purpose. You have carefully specified
several narrow categories for which updates may be
issued and now you just provide an extremely wide
category which can be used almost for any update. It
outclasses all aforementioned categories.


Regarding the proposal as a whole, I'm just afraid
if it does not dispute with the second requirement
of the Vision [3]:
Stable releases should provide a consistent user 
experience throughout the lifecycle, and *only fix 
bugs and security issues*.

(Is the Vision already cast in stone?)

[1] 
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2009-October/msg00350.html
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Audience
[3] 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Stable_release_updates_vision#Vision_Statement

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Jaroslav Reznik

On Thursday 11 March 2010 07:36:34 pm Jesse Keating wrote:
 On Thu, 2010-03-11 at 12:21 -0600, Matt Domsch wrote:
  Paul: Jesse Keating provided a draft policy for what updates should be
  done.  Board will take this into consideration, if necessary, in
  another round of discussions (not this meeting).
 
 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Stable_Release_Updates_Proposal
 
 Here is the link.  I'm going to start a new thread here.
 
 Feedback welcome.

How does this proposal go with upgrades? I think stable updates + upgrades are 
tight together. Are we going to be more conservative in new releases too? 
Extend stable release life time? LTS?

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Matthew Garrett

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:23:58PM +, Andy Green wrote:

 However I agree this isn't a real issue, the packages with the homegrown 
 apps should choke the yum update because they see the lib versions they 
 depend on would go away, so nothing breaks.

Only if they're using the packaging system. While in an ideal world 
everything would be packaged in Fedora, the reality is that there's 
plenty of code that isn't, and users do do things like download stuff 
and run ./configure; make; make install. The ones who are least likely 
to know how to generate packages are the ones who are most likely to be 
confused by applications suddenly breaking because of a soname bump, and 
they're the ones who are going to be wary of running *any* updates 
because they tend to break stuff for them.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Seth Vidal



On Fri, 12 Mar 2010, Matthew Garrett wrote:

 On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 12:23:58PM +, Andy Green wrote:

 However I agree this isn't a real issue, the packages with the homegrown
 apps should choke the yum update because they see the lib versions they
 depend on would go away, so nothing breaks.

 Only if they're using the packaging system. While in an ideal world
 everything would be packaged in Fedora,

In an ideal world I think everything would be available in an rpm package. 
However, I do not agree that everything should be packaged in fedora. I 
only say this b/c of the problem of maintenance and scale.

-sv

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

2010-03-12 Thread Matthew Garrett

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 04:39:30AM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Matthew Garrett wrote:
  If the software is not maintained within Fedora, there's no notification
  of soname bumps.
 
 There is, soname bumps are supposed to be announced on this public list.

A list that is targetted at developers of Fedora. If people aren't 
maintaining software within Fedora, there's no obvious reason for them 
to be subscribed to it.

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
 I should make people sit in a dial-up connection and have them
 update software now and then to bring them back to the ground.

I don't see why we should cripple our distribution just to support 
communication technologies from the 80s or 90s. It's 2010 now, those 
technologies are over 10 years out of date!

If the infrastructure sucks where you live, what needs to happen is that the 
infrastructure needs to improve, not that the whole world adapts to stone-
age infrastructure. Bandwidth is required for many more applications than 
just fetching Fedora updates.

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Frank Murphy wrote:
 Should we ask the community, to change our community focus:
 
 Fedora is a community of people, who come from well developed
 lifestyles. Have access to high-speed internet, do not download,
 or feel you belong unless this is satisfied.

I've been advocating for adding broadband Internet connection to Fedora's 
system requirements all the time. It is pretty much a requirement in 
practice.

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
 It is interconnected in my argument and doesn't make sense to debate in
 parts.  If you avoid breaking ABI stability, you can avoid unnecessary
 churn and one of the benefits ( think resource cost - infrastructure,
 mirrors etc)  of that is users with low bandwidth systems being able to
 take advantage of Fedora more.  While you can always brush off any
 suggestion with a position of take it or leave it, it is importance to
 recognize that there is room for improvement.If we didn't care about
 people with low bandwidth systems, we wouldn't be having yum-presto and
 LZMA compressed RPMS  So claiming that users with such systems should
 just go away doesn't fit into the development efforts already made to
 accommodate such users.

The point of those technologies is to reduce bandwidth consumption WITHOUT 
destroying what Fedora is about. They're technical solutions to technical 
problems. They have no drawbacks. (Well, yum-presto can actually make 
updates take longer on slow CPUs, but it can be disabled, so this is not an 
issue.) The changes you and some others are advocating, on the other hand, 
turn Fedora into something entirely different, and throw away some of our 
unique advantages.

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

Terry Barnaby wrote:
 I really strongly disagree that ABI interfaces of the mainly used
 shared libraries could be allowed to change in a stable release.
 We develop internal applications that are packaged and go out to a few
 users. We use Fedora primarily as an OS to run applications we need
 rather than an experimentation platform.

Then you as the provider of those applications are responsible for 
rebuilding them.

 I consider it unacceptable for a system update to break the
 ABI for these and any other third-party packages. It would mean failures
 in the field that would require live intervention. This is what
 rawhide is for.
 We would end up by turning off Fedora updating on these systems and in
 effect manage the updates of the system ourselves probably from our own
 repository (our own Fedora spin) or, probably move to a different system.
 I am sure a lot of users, like us, use Fedora for there own purposes and
 develop there own applications for it, but do not maintain them in the
 main Fedora package tree. There's more to Fedora than just the main Fedora
 repository...

Why are you using the conditional tense? Fedora CURRENTLY does NOT provide 
any ABI guarantees. There ARE ALREADY updates which change the ABI (you 
recognize them as they are normally grouped with rebuilds of other stuff for 
the bumped ABI). The people who want to change things are the ones who DON'T 
want to allow soname bumps. The only reason the core libraries you use are 
apparently not affected is that those libraries are used by so many packages 
that rebuilding them all would be impractical.

That said, this also leads to a possible solution: we could make a short 
list of core libraries for which soname bumps would be impractical to 
perform in a release, which would then also double as some form of ABI 
guarantee.

Kevin Kofler

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Re: Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)