Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
Le vendredi 27 août 2010 à 15:47 -0700, Bob Arendt a écrit : Actually I think Fedora *should* articulate who the users are, basically design and express who and what Fedora is designed for. If you poll users - people who download Fedora - and cater to their stated desires for the sake of market share, then market forces will start to drive the shape of the distro. Populist market forces would tend to force everything to a gray mushy mass of similar distros. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law). I think it would be much better for Fedora to decide what it *should* be, specifically what the Fedora userspace should be, and excel at that. As has been shown many times in the past, when you have engineers that decide who their ideal target users are, and ignore the unrepresentative users that provide actual feedback now, you get a system where they decide their ideal users agree 100% with their design, and do not care about all the boring/annoying/difficult bugs actual users are complaining about but the engineer really does not want to fix (and a majority of his fantasy users agrees with him, surprise!). This is just human nature. In closed software companies you have the same effect except marketing people are calling the shots and deciding what the fantasy users want. And they also use a reality distortion field, though not the same one the engineers would like to. This is how a perfectly fine system like Solaris degenerated in a pile of obsolete cruft: the people deciding what fantasy users wanted spent years ignoring field request to update ksh/vi/etc till the amount of cruft exceeded what could be cleaned up in a reasonable amount of time. So don't ignore our users, they may not be ideal users, but they're the only form of reality check we have now. And without a reality check, and looking where you walk, it's very easy to jump out of cliff while dreaming of castles in the sky. User requests should not be used to decide what the long term goals are, but that does not mean it is sane to pursue the long term goals without making sure current users are satisfied. And some of those users have good long-term suggestions too. -- Nicolas Mailhot -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On 08/31/2010 10:40 PM, Jeff Spaleta wrote: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Jon Masters jonat...@jonmasters.org wrote: Things like Firefox, and Thunderbird have large external teams maintaining them who appear to have goals around ensuring a consistent user experience, with testing, and so forth, over and above just getting new features. They even do self-updating on some platforms, etc. I would say they are fantastic examples of packages where you can get away with a lower commitment in favor of updating them more frequently because the upstream is known to have the user experience interest as a top priority over adding new features. But that isn't a given for every single piece of software by any means, especially when it comes to upstream testing. Uhm wait... wasn't a mid release update to thunderbird one of the historic examples of a large behavior change that precipitated a strong negative reaction? I think you are careening well away from fact based argument here. We shipped a Beta or a RC and then toggled on indexing in a post-release update. Upstream is not responsible for that. Package maintainer is. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On 08/28/2010 05:37 PM, Till Maas wrote: With the FPCA, the board could relicense everything. But RedHat appoints the board chair, who has veto power. If this is right, then this could be changed by making the chair seat another normal seat, that is voted for by the community and make the board elect it's chair by itself. Till, you know that's not true. With the FPCA, any unlicensed contributions that Fedora receives are relicensed to a Fedora approved license. The only Fedora approved licenses are Free licenses. If a contributor doesn't want Fedora determining which Free license to use on their contribution, they can put their choice of Free license on it, and Fedora then only has the option of either using it under that explicitly chosen license or not at all. So, no, the board could not relicense everything. ~spot -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 04:03:17PM -0400, Arthur Pemberton wrote: Where, keep in mind, slow is defined as twice a year, right? Yes. I think this is a remarkable definition of slow. Especially if we can provide options for people who want a faster path to do so. I don't think that's fair at all. Fedora is unique in a lot of ways, and a waterfall of updates isn't essential to that uniqueness. List those ways please, aside from the relationship with Red Hat/CentOS. Why brush that aside? Historically, there's been a lot of fear in Fedora of being perceived as merely a beta or technology preview for RHEL. By now, though, we've proven that that's not the case, that what we've said all along is true — Fedora is a great distro in its own right! But it'd be silly of us to overcompensate by distancing ourselves completely. Fedora is part of an entire ecosystem, and part of that ecosystem includes an open source company which has a great enterprise distribution based on the work we do here, and which employees a great number of engineers, hackers, developers, and designers all contributing significantly to free software. Why *start* by cutting that out? (All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?) I also think that it's not true that just because Ubuntu aims to be a general purpose distribution, we can't as well. It's unlike the coke-vs-pepsi analogy you suggest, because it's all free software and parallel development actually benefits everyone. Two groups can approach the same target differently. But that's not all there is to it. Fedora has a great release engineering team and process. There's a serious emphasis on shipping solid, professional releases. Ubuntu has a process too, but they end up with things like a zero-day last-minute respin of 10.04. That would not have happened in the same way with Fedora. There may be work to do on QA of packages that get put out as updates, but the overall QA process in Fedora is great. The packaging guidelines and initial review process are well-considered and polished by real-world use. We've got great package-development infrastructure and tools, and great people working on those. Fedora is built on important technology. For example: kickstart. It's better than Debian's scripted installs, and Ubuntu's implementation of kickstart is lacking. This is cool stuff, and it enables other cool stuff like Fedora spins. Another example: from one point of view, RPM vs. dpkg is negligible, but there are technical features which make it nicer for some purposes (like a derived distribution). My point isn't to argue about the relative virtues of different technology, but that key points of the distribution-glue are unique. And Fedora *is* fast -- see above. -- Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional Research Computing Services Harvard School of Engineering Applied Sciences -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On 08/31/2010 05:42 AM, Jesse Keating wrote: On 8/30/10 1:06 PM, Sven Lankes wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:36:42PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: Why not give QA the time to settle and find out how the new things work out? Because the likes of Kevin throw fits whenever we try to insert any QA time or seem to try and improve the quality of our updates in any way other than throw more of them at people. So you're saying we cannot test the new qa and update-process 'achievements' for a while because Kevin doesn't like them? I'm saying that these changes were made in the face of extreme resistance on Kevin's (and other's) parts. So whatever the outcome it's already going counter to the Fedora that he would like to see, or continue seeing. Sure. But from what I recall, the extreme resistance amounted to little more than posting a lot of emails, many of which were slapped down pretty quickly. Andrew. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On 08/30/2010 07:22 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:03, Jesse Keating jkeat...@redhat.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/28/2010 09:25 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: Jesse Keating wrote: The cynic in me would expect that the people who want something different than the fire hose we have now are silently leaving, and those that are left are going to say they like the deluge of updates. You say that as if it were a negative thing. To me it is. It's you and people like you that want to shove a ton of updates down the throats of our stable release users (including changes that alter behavior and sonames etc...) that have ruined the Fedora I helped to build. I want my Fedora back, I don't want what you're creating. The problem to quote a tv philosopher is: The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote. The changes towards a distribution that attracts people who live in the moment happened a while back, and has been building momentum for quite some time. Trying to erect barriers now is not going to help but make it so nothing exists afterwords. The things that can be done are: A) get out of the way, B) go with the flow, or C) figure out what you can build on top of it. [I am looking at option C] The pressure to stabilize is a much needed-correction to the pressure to innovate. Consider what happens without any such back-pressure. Those who can no longer stand the churn leave, with only the hard-core bleeding- edgers remaining. The churn gets faster. Then, even some of those who were the previous generation of bleeding-edgers can't cope, and they leave. Left behind, are the *serious* hard core. Etc... This is a classic case of unrestrained positive feedback, just like thermal runaway. In my view, this is exactly the situation we're in at the moment, but some people are trying to apply a correction to prevent the distro burning out. It is not too late. Andrew. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
Andrew Haley píše v Út 31. 08. 2010 v 09:40 +0100: On 08/31/2010 05:42 AM, Jesse Keating wrote: I'm saying that these changes were made in the face of extreme resistance on Kevin's (and other's) parts. So whatever the outcome it's already going counter to the Fedora that he would like to see, or continue seeing. Sure. But from what I recall, the extreme resistance amounted to little more than posting a lot of emails, many of which were slapped down pretty quickly. What kind of resistance would you consider extreme? Napalm? Mirek -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 9:36 PM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@j2solutions.net wrote: Thomas Janssen thom...@fedoraproject.org wrote: What previous niche? We had a distro that was pretty general purpose, worked for servers and desktops and even laptops. We had a predictable schedule. We had new technology thanks to rawhide. We had timely bugfixes that didn't sacrifice stability, as in things didn't change out from under you on a stable release. We had an ecosystem of third parties that would build up stacks of newer things should a user be adventurous. We had a fresh release quite often that could be relied upon for at least a year. We had a culture of not just throwing crap over the wall at our users, which included ourselves. We had accountability when things did go awry and a honest effort to disrupt the users of our stable releases as little as possible. We also we're a very free distro avoiding nonfree stuff, and we worked well with upstreams. We we're easy to configure, easy to update, easy to install whether a single system or 400 systems in a lab. We we're easy to administrate in the same scenarios. This was fairly unique and what drew a lot of people to the project. I'm not sure i would call that a niche, but it sounds very good. Count me in. It's getting to the point where me, as a long time Fedora developer and sometimes leader, is not enjoying using Fedora any more. Every update run can break things, and often does. Why not give QA the time to settle and find out how the new things work out? Because the likes of Kevin throw fits whenever we try to insert any QA time or seem to try and improve the quality of our updates in any way other than throw more of them at people. Hm, ignore Kevin or the likes here. The new Bodhi and proventesters are a good step in the right direction. As proventester and 24/7-updates-testing enabled guy, i can say, it starts to work. Thanks to everybody involved. Every update takes for ever because there are so many updates. Too many to review each one and see what it does, and how to maybe test it and provide feedback. Updates runs just get pushed off longer and longer so that I have a block of time to A) apply the damn things, and B) spend a few hours recovering from any sort of fallout in my workflow. What DE is in use on your box? I use Gnome with some KDE apps. The Gnome Desktop should be safe (not a Gnome user so i can only guess here, sorry) and the KDE Desktop gets more and more stable. Means the *big* UI changes are over. Small improvements will most likely always happen, together with bugfixes, as that's the KDE philosophy. People like me likes that, but i can understand the others who don't want even small changes. I personally would like to see a F n-1 that gets just the badly needed bugfixes (security and crash). But have the latest release get mixed updates, bugfixes and smaller UI improvements. That way, the ones with slow i-net or just don't want to see much updates could be happy with n-1. And all the others as well with the latest release. Rawhide and personal repos, would still fulfil the role for people living on the real bleeding side of the edge and for hot-new-stuff to develop in. -- Best regards Thomas -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On 08/31/2010 11:55 AM, Miloslav Trmač wrote: Andrew Haley píše v Út 31. 08. 2010 v 09:40 +0100: On 08/31/2010 05:42 AM, Jesse Keating wrote: I'm saying that these changes were made in the face of extreme resistance on Kevin's (and other's) parts. So whatever the outcome it's already going counter to the Fedora that he would like to see, or continue seeing. Sure. But from what I recall, the extreme resistance amounted to little more than posting a lot of emails, many of which were slapped down pretty quickly. What kind of resistance would you consider extreme? Napalm? Something along those lines. :-) Andrew. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 12:48:02AM -0400, Arthur Pemberton wrote: New features hit rawhide all the time, with no waiting period. So developers are going to put new features into rawhide knowing that they will never make it to updates? That seems like an excellent model, yes. When the next Fedora release tree is branched in less than six months, the new features automatically become widely available. -- Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional Research Computing Services Harvard School of Engineering Applied Sciences -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 22:08 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: Developers put new features in rawhide knowing that they will be in the next release of Fedora, which would be at the /most/ 6 months from the time they drop the feature. It's more like 9 months. A feature has to wait until the next branching of a Fedora version from rawhide, and then for that Fedora version to be released. For example, a feature that landed in rawhide on 2010-02-19, just after F13 was branched, would end up in F14 on 2010-11-02. Your point is still taken. -- Matt -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 22:47 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 22:33 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: Where do you see somebody proposing that no updates be issued? Where do you see somebody proposing a setup where fixing a graphics card can't be done in the stable release kernel? You've built up a nice strawman that you've lovingly kicked down. It's implicit in what Jon said; I was pointing out that he was, possibly inadvertently, suggesting a principle that was far too strict. IMO if hardware enablement can be done at no risk, then ok. But as Jesse said, rebasing some major component to achieve that would not be ok. I don't really want to pick on Xorg since it usually works well. But, in the theoretical sense my own opinion is that it's better to have a few people wait six months for stable support for some new hardware or have to install some additional - separate - packages for that, if there's a risk to the existing users. Existing user experience should come first because they are already running Fedora F-X, not contemplating it. As Jesse also said, how we define breakage varies a lot, too. For example, the latest version of evolution out of the box on F13 treats Mark Messages as Read differently from F12. It now wants you to confirm every time you do this, not just on folders that have sub-folders, or when touching the top-level Inbox. Had that behavior changed before the upgrade, I would have regarded it as a form of breakage because it affects how one reads mail vs. the day before. Sure, it's not package breakage, but it is a change in behavior. You could say that's not breakage, but it would seem to fall afoul of the existing policy described in the User_base documents on the wiki. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On 08/31/2010 11:26 AM, Arthur Pemberton wrote: Strongly free and tracking upstream is something developers would appreciate, however bug fix only updates are often contrary to what developers want and outlier users like myself. It depends on whether Fedora is a platform for development. If it is, developers usually do not want many changes. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 00:45:49 -0400, Arthur Pemberton pem...@gmail.com wrote: So far the only brokeness I have had in all of F13 is with `seabios-bin`. Wasn't there recently a packagekit problem where it stopped doing updates, making it kind of hard to get a fix unless you knew about yum? That's a pretty significant oops. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, 31 Aug 2010, Bruno Wolff III wrote: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 00:45:49 -0400, Arthur Pemberton pem...@gmail.com wrote: So far the only brokeness I have had in all of F13 is with `seabios-bin`. Wasn't there recently a packagekit problem where it stopped doing updates, making it kind of hard to get a fix unless you knew about yum? That's a pretty significant oops. Yes we have links on some of our sites like - http://start.fedoraproject.org/ for example. The sad thing is this is the second time this has happened in the last few releases. -Mike -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
... So in other words, dependency 1.6 to 1.6.1 is okay as it is likely a bug fix, but 1.6 to 1.8 is not okay because it is a new release. there's no reason why 1.8 won't be ok after 2-3 weeks in updates-testing So, web developers want latest httpd/PHP/Rails/MySQL; GNOME developers want latest gtk/libgnome*; and so on. I wouldn't be so sure about that. If I was developing a web application I would want my version of httpd/PHP/Rails/MySQL to remain stable - the last thing I want is a bug to appear in the application I am writing and have to wonder if it is a problem with my code or did the update in my framework change something on me. If you develop some app you want to catch bugs in your app as fast as possible because you don't want release something that is broken just because there is newer library out there. Also my own experience: I wanted webmail client with some set of features the only client (except too big hordce imp) was latest roundcube. I had to package it myselfs because it was not even in latest fedora and then update all dendencies because it was not working with ancient php centos5 provides. I know Fedora is much faster than CentOS, but still... there's no reason why we should not update packages to newer *stable* release Similarly, everyone who cares about the tools they use daily (which developers tend to), wants the best versions of these tools, as soon as it is practical. So, newest version of emacs/vim/kdevelop/... Again, as a developer I would disagree. Again, as a developer I would agree with Miloslav The result is a distribution on which it is reasonably easy to develop current software, and a distribution on which one might not update critical system updates on the night before giving a presentation on a conference (FWIW, I can't recall a really bad updates experience). That doesn't seem to be a bad tradeoff - for a developer. So lets see, you are going to give a presentation or attend a conference, where you will likely be using an unsecured network with many threats that likely don't exist in your home or office environment, and you are saying that because we have a distrubition where anything can change and possibly break things you think it is okay that you have to forgo critical system updates that might prevent your system from being hacked? How can that be viewed as an acceptable tradeoff? That package won't be ancient old, so the risk is small to almost zero. You'd understand the tradeoff better after first not working presentation you've tried to do. I won't update nothing day or two before presentation even from current fedora/centos/... -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 8/31/10 5:33 AM, Matt McCutchen wrote: On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 22:08 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: Developers put new features in rawhide knowing that they will be in the next release of Fedora, which would be at the /most/ 6 months from the time they drop the feature. It's more like 9 months. A feature has to wait until the next branching of a Fedora version from rawhide, and then for that Fedora version to be released. For example, a feature that landed in rawhide on 2010-02-19, just after F13 was branched, would end up in F14 on 2010-11-02. Your point is still taken. It'd be in the Alpha for F14 much earlier. And all along the way, from rawhide - branched - alpha - beta - final it'll have users using it and providing feedback, and a progressively less scary target for eager users to jump to if they want that new feature earlier. - -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx9GsUACgkQ4v2HLvE71NWdeACgn6fdpqnOxhe9VTfJEMk8+kjr XhkAoKefWbmoR7KEewiySDGRmZiXqCxX =+rfo -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 08:54 -0400, Jon Masters wrote: On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 22:47 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 22:33 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: Where do you see somebody proposing that no updates be issued? Where do you see somebody proposing a setup where fixing a graphics card can't be done in the stable release kernel? You've built up a nice strawman that you've lovingly kicked down. It's implicit in what Jon said; I was pointing out that he was, possibly inadvertently, suggesting a principle that was far too strict. IMO if hardware enablement can be done at no risk, then ok. But as Jesse I wasn't really talking about the topic of the argument, it was more of a meta-post on how the argument is being conducted. There's already clearly (at least) two schools of thought and compromising between them would be very difficult. If either or both schools start supporting their arguments with categorical statements like as if waiting six months really mattered in the real world, it's only going to make it harder. In a discussion like this it's only possible to come to a vaguely workable compromise without everyone hating each other if you at least acknowledge that the other point of view has some validity too, even if it's not the one you share. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tuesday, August 31, 2010 16:14:39 Matthew Miller wrote: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 03:57:47PM +0200, Michal Hlavinka wrote: So in other words, dependency 1.6 to 1.6.1 is okay as it is likely a bug fix, but 1.6 to 1.8 is not okay because it is a new release. there's no reason why 1.8 won't be ok after 2-3 weeks in updates-testing I hope you are kidding. nope, I'm 100 % serious Of course, these imaginary numbers aren't very helpful -- some programs make only minor changes between whole-version-number releases, whereas others revolutionize the whole project beteen 0.88 and 0.89. The policy can't be based on version numbers -- it has to be on potential risk. Note: I agree there should be no updates breaking something - for example when configuration files from old version does not work with new version. That's out of the question. Fedora is not the only distro using (and testing) some program/library. Also there is very low potential risk to have some problem in F n-1 if the package works fine in F n. I really don't see any problem with: new version in rawhide and Fn updates-testing (after two weeks) updates for Fn, updates-testing for F n-1 (after two weeks) updates for F n-1, updates-testing for F n-2 Fedora = “Freedom, Friends, Features, *First*” -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 05:31:43PM +0200, Michal Hlavinka wrote: So in other words, dependency 1.6 to 1.6.1 is okay as it is likely a bug fix, but 1.6 to 1.8 is not okay because it is a new release. there's no reason why 1.8 won't be ok after 2-3 weeks in updates-testing I hope you are kidding. nope, I'm 100 % serious Unfortunately, then: this does not currently match reality. -- Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional Research Computing Services Harvard School of Engineering Applied Sciences -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 8/31/10 6:57 AM, Michal Hlavinka wrote: there's no reason why 1.8 won't be ok after 2-3 weeks in updates-testing An update that changes behavior for the end user would never be acceptable as an update to a stable release. Only severe exceptions should be made to this rule, where the time/effort to backport the important fixes from a new upstream release are cost prohibitive and too complicated to do on our own. rawhide is not to F-n as debian unstable is to debian testing. F-n is not to F-(n-1) as debian testing is to debian stable. - -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx9IhwACgkQ4v2HLvE71NXnpgCfcso2mCew20a1ERPE31+jJg4z MtcAnRGCoa1Lrv5loMdOCSqC+4KTchW4 =q/v4 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On 08/30/2010 10:48 PM, Arthur Pemberton wrote: So developers are going to put new features into rawhide knowing that they will never make it to updates? I do it all the time because I know it will be out ~ 6 months, which is pretty quick. -- Orion Poplawski Technical Manager 303-415-9701 x222 NWRA/CoRA DivisionFAX: 303-415-9702 3380 Mitchell Lane or...@cora.nwra.com Boulder, CO 80301 http://www.cora.nwra.com -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On 08/30/2010 10:50 PM, Arthur Pemberton wrote: The attention to freedom is not unique. The attention to upstream is invisible to users. But it is why I want to *develop* for Fedora. -- Orion Poplawski Technical Manager 303-415-9701 x222 NWRA/CoRA DivisionFAX: 303-415-9702 3380 Mitchell Lane or...@cora.nwra.com Boulder, CO 80301 http://www.cora.nwra.com -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tuesday, August 31, 2010 17:36:39 Matthew Miller wrote: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 05:31:43PM +0200, Michal Hlavinka wrote: So in other words, dependency 1.6 to 1.6.1 is okay as it is likely a bug fix, but 1.6 to 1.8 is not okay because it is a new release. there's no reason why 1.8 won't be ok after 2-3 weeks in updates-testing I hope you are kidding. nope, I'm 100 % serious Unfortunately, then: this does not currently match reality. that's not any usefull information for discussion. If you can only offend instead of bringing some new information/arguments, please do not spam this thread, there is a lot of posts already. thanks -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tuesday, August 31, 2010 17:39:11 Jesse Keating wrote: On 8/31/10 6:57 AM, Michal Hlavinka wrote: there's no reason why 1.8 won't be ok after 2-3 weeks in updates-testing An update that changes behavior for the end user would never be acceptable as an update to a stable release. Only severe exceptions should be made to this rule, where the time/effort to backport the important fixes from a new upstream release are cost prohibitive and too complicated to do on our own. I don't thing there is so much updates that change behaviour, see firefox, thunderbird, kopete, usually there are only new features with old functionality intact. What I wrote was not a rule, there is always a lot of space for maintainer's decission. rawhide is not to F-n as debian unstable is to debian testing. F-n is not to F-(n-1) as debian testing is to debian stable. no, but I think rawhide is to F-n as debian unstable is to debian stable. What I wrote as an example was expecting all versions in F-x are stable not that one version is more stable than another one. That delay was only for being really sure package is stable, because there are not too much users testing updates-testing packages if it's not new firefox/kernel/... but after a two weaks in F-n any package is tested quite well -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 07:05, Rahul Sundaram methe...@gmail.com wrote: On 08/31/2010 11:26 AM, Arthur Pemberton wrote: Strongly free and tracking upstream is something developers would appreciate, however bug fix only updates are often contrary to what developers want and outlier users like myself. It depends on whether Fedora is a platform for development. If it is, developers usually do not want many changes. It depends on the type of developer and what they are doing. Trying to lump all the developers into one bottle is one of the problems of this so-called conversation. -- Stephen J Smoogen. “The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.” Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University. We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things. — Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 06:08:09PM +0200, Michal Hlavinka wrote: there's no reason why 1.8 won't be ok after 2-3 weeks in updates-testing I hope you are kidding. nope, I'm 100 % serious Unfortunately, then: this does not currently match reality. that's not any usefull information for discussion. If you can only offend instead of bringing some new information/arguments, please do not spam this thread, there is a lot of posts already. thanks I don't mean to offend. And I also don't think there's any new information. The basic fact of current reality is that the testing repositories do not get enough exposure or formal testing to demonstrate that an update is okay. -- Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional Research Computing Services Harvard School of Engineering Applied Sciences -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On 08/31/2010 12:26 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 07:05, Rahul Sundaram methe...@gmail.com wrote: It depends on whether Fedora is a platform for development. If it is, developers usually do not want many changes. It depends on the type of developer and what they are doing. Trying to lump all the developers into one bottle is one of the problems of this so-called conversation. I concur - I know some who are happy with things staying as they were in 1980. I know more who prefer reasonably current toolkits - many get frustrated when obligated to work on older installs (the 'stable' but somewhat ancient ones in particular) which may have packages a few years older than current. And its not just kernels, libraries and compilers but applications too. (e.g TeXlive without biblatex, openoffice without docx etc etc). gene/ -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 7:39 AM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@j2solutions.net wrote: An update that changes behavior for the end user would never be acceptable as an update to a stable release. Only severe exceptions should be made to this rule, where the time/effort to backport the important fixes from a new upstream release are cost prohibitive and too complicated to do on our own. Uhm... there are end-user applications under active development that see monthly-ish updates that can include UI changes and bug fixes together. In fact UI changes could be considered bugfixes. Are you sure there is a bright line concerning changes to end-user observable behavior? I'm not. Bugfixes can deliberately and purposefully change behavior that some users are used to. I'm a package maintainer for one such application. I have yet to hear from a single user...ever..that tracking releases from upstream has been unwanted for this specific application regardless of the UI tweaks that happen between upstream releases. In fact I have bug reports to the contrary asking me to push newer versions because I originally held back updates across a significant upstream version boundary. Am I going to be disallowed from tracking upstream's release schedule for this particular application by providing monthlyish updates and moving them through updates-testing into updates-released? -jef -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
2010/8/31 Jesse Keating jkeat...@j2solutions.net: An update that changes behavior for the end user would never be acceptable as an update to a stable release. Only severe exceptions should be made to this rule, where the time/effort to backport the important fixes from a new upstream release are cost prohibitive and too complicated to do on our own. An update that does not change behavior for the end user is ... not meaningful. Any update changes something, otherwise it would not have been issued. And sometimes it is not at all clear if that change is welcome or not. A bug fix might be in most cases, but could also mean some work to the end user as well, like removing a workaround. We should accept that people have different expectations, and draw different lines in the trade of getting new bug fixes and new features vs. coping with breakage and changed behavior. People might even have different expectations from package to package. If we decide to draw that line at a fixed point, distribution-wide, we'll lose people, inevitably. So lets try to come up with ideas how to satisfy both (or even more than two) needs. Making categories (critical packages vs. non-critical packages) is a good step in the right direction, as well as more than one repository. If there are issues the build system or the packaging tools cannot handle, good, that is a technical problem and can be solved. We're not here for politics, are we? - Thomas -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 08:40:29 -0800, Jeff Spaleta jspal...@gmail.com wrote: I'm a package maintainer for one such application. I have yet to hear from a single user...ever..that tracking releases from upstream has been unwanted for this specific application regardless of the UI tweaks that happen between upstream releases. In fact I have bug reports to the contrary asking me to push newer versions because I originally held back updates across a significant upstream version boundary. Packages that need to sync to external servers or peers such as multiplayer games have similar issues. You need to be up to date to for the package to be useful in some cases. I would like to see some per package exceptions to this policy that don't need to be revisited for every update. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 18:18 +0200, Michal Hlavinka wrote: On Tuesday, August 31, 2010 17:39:11 Jesse Keating wrote: On 8/31/10 6:57 AM, Michal Hlavinka wrote: there's no reason why 1.8 won't be ok after 2-3 weeks in updates-testing An update that changes behavior for the end user would never be acceptable as an update to a stable release. Only severe exceptions should be made to this rule, where the time/effort to backport the important fixes from a new upstream release are cost prohibitive and too complicated to do on our own. I don't thing there is so much updates that change behaviour, see firefox, thunderbird, kopete, usually there are only new features with old functionality intact. What I wrote was not a rule, there is always a lot of space for maintainer's decission. Things like Firefox, and Thunderbird have large external teams maintaining them who appear to have goals around ensuring a consistent user experience, with testing, and so forth, over and above just getting new features. They even do self-updating on some platforms, etc. I would say they are fantastic examples of packages where you can get away with a lower commitment in favor of updating them more frequently because the upstream is known to have the user experience interest as a top priority over adding new features. But that isn't a given for every single piece of software by any means, especially when it comes to upstream testing. I was saying elsewhere that I think what could work for something like the Server SIG would be a very strong commitment to the crit-path bits, regular cross-team meetings to discuss proposals and pain points, and a very co-ordinated planning effort to change the guts of the system. There is some effort to do that kind of thing already with a different treatment of crit-path updates, but I think it should go further. Then, I suppose it would be ok to agree to have a lesser commitment for some other packages like Firefox, especially where Mozilla (and the packager) is known to be doing a very good job providing consistent experience. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Jon Masters jonat...@jonmasters.org wrote: Things like Firefox, and Thunderbird have large external teams maintaining them who appear to have goals around ensuring a consistent user experience, with testing, and so forth, over and above just getting new features. They even do self-updating on some platforms, etc. I would say they are fantastic examples of packages where you can get away with a lower commitment in favor of updating them more frequently because the upstream is known to have the user experience interest as a top priority over adding new features. But that isn't a given for every single piece of software by any means, especially when it comes to upstream testing. Uhm wait... wasn't a mid release update to thunderbird one of the historic examples of a large behavior change that precipitated a strong negative reaction? I think you are careening well away from fact based argument here. -jef -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 09:58 -0600, Orion Poplawski wrote: On 08/30/2010 10:50 PM, Arthur Pemberton wrote: The attention to freedom is not unique. The attention to upstream is invisible to users. But it is why I want to *develop* for Fedora. You cut out the rest of Arthur's email, where he says exactly the same thing. This isn't a point scoring exercise, please read entire emails before you spot a piece you think you disagree with and try to win by contradicting it. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 11:51:27AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote: I would like to see some per package exceptions to this policy that don't need to be revisited for every update. I think it's reasonable to put packages into different tiers. Or lanes, if we don't want to think in terms of which is on top of the other. -- Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional Research Computing Services Harvard School of Engineering Applied Sciences -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 12:32 PM, Adam Williamson awill...@redhat.com wrote: On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 09:58 -0600, Orion Poplawski wrote: On 08/30/2010 10:50 PM, Arthur Pemberton wrote: The attention to freedom is not unique. The attention to upstream is invisible to users. But it is why I want to *develop* for Fedora. You cut out the rest of Arthur's email, where he says exactly the same thing. This isn't a point scoring exercise, please read entire emails before you spot a piece you think you disagree with and try to win by contradicting it. Thank you for mentioning this, I was simply not going to respond to Mr. Poplawski. Maybe I was too long winded, or failed to communicate my point: a stable (bug fix only updates, slow feature release), strongly FOSS, strongly upstream seems to be what some (I am not going to make assumptions about numbers) want. I see two problems with this: 1) the nature of such a distro would make it attractive to a smaller percentage of the Linux community 2) the only aspect of that that would be unique is the commitment to upstream -- something which will be appreciated by few I'm not saying that any aspect of such a mission would be bad, just that it would be very niche. -- Fedora 13 (www.pembo13.com) -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Fri, 2010-08-27 at 18:08 -0400, Jon Masters wrote: Again, I feel it is necessary to have a survey of Fedora users. That's users you've already got. It might make the users you already have happier, sure, and that's a fine thing to do. Iif you want to grow, though, you may be limiting yourself by only considering responses from people you've already won, if that makes sense. E.g., sure, I can make a better grilled steak that I already serve, and that'll make the customers I have happier, but if I want to expand my customer base I might want to consider at least a couple of veggie-friendly dishes for the menu. If you define a desired target, then you know who to survey that you haven't even gotten as a user yet and understand better how to win them over and expand your userbase... But I don't think we even have agreement amongst contributors that we want to expand the userbase (which is troubling to me.) ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
* Bruno Wolff III [31/08/2010 19:25] : Packages that need to sync to external servers or peers such as multiplayer games have similar issues. You need to be up to date to for the package to be useful in some cases. Same goes for programs that scrape web pages (I'm thinking of gcstar but I'm sure there are others). If the page layout changes, the page scraper needs to be updated and that usually involves updating the package. Emmanuel -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 20:41 -0400, Jon Masters wrote: Great stuff. And there's more in there too. So the current User_base in addition to being not very well linked and referenced could hardly be described as reflecting all of the views in this particular thread. Should it really reflect all the views in this thread? Isn't that literally design-by-committee? ~m -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Emmanuel Seyman emmanuel.sey...@club-internet.fr wrote: Same goes for programs that scrape web pages (I'm thinking of gcstar but I'm sure there are others). If the page layout changes, the page scraper needs to be updated and that usually involves updating the package. Yep.. gourmet does this to some extent as well for scrape recipes from specific sites as well as provide a generic web scraper for you to build your own recipe grabber. -jef -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
Jeff Spaleta (jspal...@gmail.com) said: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Emmanuel Seyman emmanuel.sey...@club-internet.fr wrote: Same goes for programs that scrape web pages (I'm thinking of gcstar but I'm sure there are others). If the page layout changes, the page scraper needs to be updated and that usually involves updating the package. Yep.. gourmet does this to some extent as well for scrape recipes from specific sites as well as provide a generic web scraper for you to build your own recipe grabber. That's gross. (I realize you're blocked on the sites you rely on, but geez, can't you find sites with real APIs?) Bill -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Bill Nottingham nott...@redhat.com wrote: That's gross. (I realize you're blocked on the sites you rely on, but geez, can't you find sites with real APIs?) It is what it is. Though I do like being given credit for doing development work that I'm not actually responsible for. Makes me feel important. if you have specific recipe cites that have a documented API that you'd like to see added file an RFE with as much information as you can and I'll see if I can't help implement an API client plugin for that site inside the gourmet plugin system to gift to the upstream developers. -jef -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
Some people like everything up-to-date, while others are more conservative. Fine. Isn't there a middle ground? Currently there are these repos: updates and updates_testing. Maybe two more repos could be added: updates_fixes and updates_enhancements. After a package stays for a while in updates_testing, and is considered good, the package maintainer would decide where to move it. If it is security-related it would go to updates, if not he would look at the changes since the previous version. If the changes are minor, just bug fixes, the package would go to updates_fixes, if besides bug fixes it has enhancements, it would be moved to updates_enhancements. People with yum would enable the repos they need according to their requirements. People using PackageKit or yumex would have two tick boxes in option settings to enable (or not) fixes and enhancements. The downside is that if upstream the security fixes are available only at the latest source, it would take some work to port just the security fixes on top of the latest stable version. It would be easier just to get the full upstream version (including enhancements and bug fixes) and package it and move into updates. It would then be the choice of the package maintainer to decide on what to do based on time available and how comfortable he feels patching source code: either port just security fixes (which implies doing two packages, one with just security fixes and another with enhancements) or a single package with everything. --- P. S. As an alternative to the above, to simplify things a bit, a single new repo could be created, with both enhancements and fixes. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
* Bill Nottingham [31/08/2010 21:01] : That's gross. Yup, no question about it. (I realize you're blocked on the sites you rely on, but geez, can't you find sites with real APIs?) For some of them, it is possible (DVDfr.com has a stable XML API and the webmaster has contributed to GCstar). Sadly, it's the exception rather than the rule. Emmanuel -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
Jeff Spaleta (jspal...@gmail.com) said: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Bill Nottingham nott...@redhat.com wrote: That's gross. (I realize you're blocked on the sites you rely on, but geez, can't you find sites with real APIs?) It is what it is. Though I do like being given credit for doing development work that I'm not actually responsible for. Makes me feel important. It is not meant to be a complaint at you or a request for you to do more work. It's a complaint at the state of the world. (Why not find the biggest windmill of all to tilt at?) Bill -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 01:26:27PM -0400, Arthur Pemberton wrote: Maybe I was too long winded, or failed to communicate my point: a stable (bug fix only updates, slow feature release), strongly FOSS, strongly upstream seems to be what some (I am not going to make assumptions about numbers) want. I see two problems with this: Where, keep in mind, slow is defined as twice a year, right? 1) the nature of such a distro would make it attractive to a smaller percentage of the Linux community Do you have a basis for this claim? I think it's the opposite. 2) the only aspect of that that would be unique is the commitment to upstream -- something which will be appreciated by few I don't think that's fair at all. Fedora is unique in a lot of ways, and a waterfall of updates isn't essential to that uniqueness. -- Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional Research Computing Services Harvard School of Engineering Applied Sciences -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 20:03 +0100, Piscium wrote: Some people like everything up-to-date, while others are more conservative. Fine. Isn't there a middle ground? Currently there are these repos: updates and updates_testing. Maybe two more repos could be added: updates_fixes and updates_enhancements. We've had multiple proposals along these lines (as I mentioned in passing on my general post about the three main ways to deal with software delivery in a repository-based OS). The principal objection to them is that it results in more work for already overworked developers. I don't think any of the proposals has been seriously considered at FESCo or Board level yet, though IMBW. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 3:56 PM, Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org wrote: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 01:26:27PM -0400, Arthur Pemberton wrote: Maybe I was too long winded, or failed to communicate my point: a stable (bug fix only updates, slow feature release), strongly FOSS, strongly upstream seems to be what some (I am not going to make assumptions about numbers) want. I see two problems with this: Where, keep in mind, slow is defined as twice a year, right? Yes. 1) the nature of such a distro would make it attractive to a smaller percentage of the Linux community Do you have a basis for this claim? I think it's the opposite. The basis is logic. Users who want stable, slow environments do so primarily because the want simpler to setup and maintain systems. Those users also don't want to install other unsupported repositories for full drivers, codecs, font engines, media, players ect which they then have to install unassisted. 2) the only aspect of that that would be unique is the commitment to upstream -- something which will be appreciated by few I don't think that's fair at all. Fedora is unique in a lot of ways, and a waterfall of updates isn't essential to that uniqueness. List those ways please, aside from the relationship with Red Hat/CentOS. -- Fedora 13 (www.pembo13.com) -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 15:56 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 01:26:27PM -0400, Arthur Pemberton wrote: Maybe I was too long winded, or failed to communicate my point: a stable (bug fix only updates, slow feature release), strongly FOSS, strongly upstream seems to be what some (I am not going to make assumptions about numbers) want. I see two problems with this: Where, keep in mind, slow is defined as twice a year, right? 1) the nature of such a distro would make it attractive to a smaller percentage of the Linux community Do you have a basis for this claim? I think it's the opposite. 2) the only aspect of that that would be unique is the commitment to upstream -- something which will be appreciated by few I don't think that's fair at all. Fedora is unique in a lot of ways, and a waterfall of updates isn't essential to that uniqueness. Arthur's idea was better expressed in his original mail. His point was that a Fedora aiming at the niche described (by Jesse) would differ from Ubuntu solely in its more rigorous interpretation of 'freedom' and its attention to upstream, which experience seems to show are not things the majority of people who go for the Ubuntu niche care much about. I think this is a pretty reasonable thesis - note how popular non-free software is with Ubuntu users, how many people use Mint (which is essentially Ubuntu with even more non-free stuff added), and how few people use/used the more-strictly-free Ubuntu variations that have existed. As he put it, I am suggesting that the mission you would like is contradictory: not that it cannot happen, but in that it represents an intersection of people that is very small. The niche described is a kind of mix of attributes that appeal to entirely different types of users/contributors. Do go back and read his original email, Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:56:26 -0400 (30/08/10 10:56:26 PM). -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 11:26 AM, Bill Nottingham nott...@redhat.com wrote: It is not meant to be a complaint at you or a request for you to do more work. It's a complaint at the state of the world. (Why not find the biggest windmill of all to tilt at?) I didn't mean for you to think it was a complaint. If I actually had developed anything significant in gourmet I'd be beaming with pride with the notoriety. Seriously though, there is a plugin system, it is possible to avoid webscraping. If there are recipe sites out there with documented APIs we can get those sites their own site-specific plugin with a weebit of effort without completely re-engineering how gourmet works. Even then..if the API changes we are in the same boat with regard to updates mid-release. -jef -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 13:45 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote: On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 20:41 -0400, Jon Masters wrote: Great stuff. And there's more in there too. So the current User_base in addition to being not very well linked and referenced could hardly be described as reflecting all of the views in this particular thread. Should it really reflect all the views in this thread? Not necessarily. What I'm saying is that it says one thing and the reality *is* very different. I see quite a few posts basically saying that that document doesn't matter to them at all, etc. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 8/31/10 9:40 AM, Jeff Spaleta wrote: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 7:39 AM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@j2solutions.net wrote: An update that changes behavior for the end user would never be acceptable as an update to a stable release. Only severe exceptions should be made to this rule, where the time/effort to backport the important fixes from a new upstream release are cost prohibitive and too complicated to do on our own. Uhm... there are end-user applications under active development that see monthly-ish updates that can include UI changes and bug fixes together. In fact UI changes could be considered bugfixes. Are you sure there is a bright line concerning changes to end-user observable behavior? I'm not. Bugfixes can deliberately and purposefully change behavior that some users are used to. I'm a package maintainer for one such application. I have yet to hear from a single user...ever..that tracking releases from upstream has been unwanted for this specific application regardless of the UI tweaks that happen between upstream releases. In fact I have bug reports to the contrary asking me to push newer versions because I originally held back updates across a significant upstream version boundary. Am I going to be disallowed from tracking upstream's release schedule for this particular application by providing monthlyish updates and moving them through updates-testing into updates-released? I appreciate that there are going to be exceptions to the rule. There are going to be packages or suites of packages where the users far and away prefer always the latest whenever possible. In the cases where these packages are leaf node with little interaction across the rest of the distro I think that's fine to have a stated exception (and expectation) to the policy. But they should be the exceptions and not the rules. - -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx9akMACgkQ4v2HLvE71NW9IgCfU13FFR/bkUuZO25gBz4NSqrC PJsAnR6HwtshFaBMTrdOsidayuEcX2V7 =YK8m -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Adam Williamson awill...@redhat.com wrote: On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 15:56 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote: On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 01:26:27PM -0400, Arthur Pemberton wrote: Maybe I was too long winded, or failed to communicate my point: a stable (bug fix only updates, slow feature release), strongly FOSS, strongly upstream seems to be what some (I am not going to make assumptions about numbers) want. I see two problems with this: Where, keep in mind, slow is defined as twice a year, right? 1) the nature of such a distro would make it attractive to a smaller percentage of the Linux community Do you have a basis for this claim? I think it's the opposite. 2) the only aspect of that that would be unique is the commitment to upstream -- something which will be appreciated by few I don't think that's fair at all. Fedora is unique in a lot of ways, and a waterfall of updates isn't essential to that uniqueness. Arthur's idea was better expressed in his original mail. His point was that a Fedora aiming at the niche described (by Jesse) would differ from Ubuntu solely in its more rigorous interpretation of 'freedom' and its attention to upstream, which experience seems to show are not things the majority of people who go for the Ubuntu niche care much about. I think this is a pretty reasonable thesis - note how popular non-free software is with Ubuntu users, how many people use Mint (which is essentially Ubuntu with even more non-free stuff added), and how few people use/used the more-strictly-free Ubuntu variations that have existed. As he put it, I am suggesting that the mission you would like is contradictory: not that it cannot happen, but in that it represents an intersection of people that is very small. The niche described is a kind of mix of attributes that appeal to entirely different types of users/contributors. Exactly, the key idea is The niche described is a kind of mix of attributes that appeal to entirely different types of users/contributors. It is an admirable goal to push for, even it it may nto reflect my own desires. However, I believe that it may be analogous to selling vegan dishes at a butcher shop. -- Fedora 13 (www.pembo13.com) -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 8/31/10 9:40 AM, Thomas Moschny wrote: 2010/8/31 Jesse Keating jkeat...@j2solutions.net: An update that changes behavior for the end user would never be acceptable as an update to a stable release. Only severe exceptions should be made to this rule, where the time/effort to backport the important fixes from a new upstream release are cost prohibitive and too complicated to do on our own. An update that does not change behavior for the end user is ... not meaningful. Ok, fair point. change behavior is too vague here. I'm trying to draw a difference between fixing a bug (which would change the behavior) and changing things as an enhancement or a re-write, or whatever you want to call it. That is if a user is used to interacting with an application in one way that is not somehow taking advantage of a flaw, an update that comes along and changes the way a user has to interact with that software, that is what I wish to avoid. Surprise is not good, one doesn't expect to have to re-discover applications and work flows after applying vendor provided updates for a stable release. Any update changes something, otherwise it would not have been issued. And sometimes it is not at all clear if that change is welcome or not. A bug fix might be in most cases, but could also mean some work to the end user as well, like removing a workaround. We should accept that people have different expectations, and draw different lines in the trade of getting new bug fixes and new features vs. coping with breakage and changed behavior. People might even have different expectations from package to package. If we decide to draw that line at a fixed point, distribution-wide, we'll lose people, inevitably. So lets try to come up with ideas how to satisfy both (or even more than two) needs. Making categories (critical packages vs. non-critical packages) is a good step in the right direction, as well as more than one repository. If there are issues the build system or the packaging tools cannot handle, good, that is a technical problem and can be solved. We're not here for politics, are we? - Thomas I'm not proposing a iron clad rule. I'm proposing a default way of treating our updates and users. Exceptions to the default can be made, and in some cases must be made. I'm arguing though to default on the side of keeping a release consistent and stable throughout the life of the release. - -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx9fp4ACgkQ4v2HLvE71NU0YwCguxeBjFNq4+qMk7JsMhwvSGGp MSYAn2RhPBPneRTB4wHztHq3TfbxwK3B =eE3d -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On 29 August 2010 21:15, Kevin Fenzi ke...@scrye.com wrote: On Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:38:29 +0100 Piscium grok...@gmail.com wrote: Please do join in the design team and help them out: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join_the_Design_Team While I appreciate the arts, I am not good at creating art, so I am afraid I would be of no use to the design team. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On 08/30/2010 12:08 PM, Piscium wrote: While I appreciate the arts, I am not good at creating art, so I am afraid I would be of no use to the design team. Providing constructive and directed feedback would certainly count as a useful contribution. Design team mailing list often has discussions about proposals before picking a theme or whatever. Rahul -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/28/2010 02:37 PM, Till Maas wrote: And you managed to proper quote! \o/ Now the next step is not to create very long lines. ;-) Ugh, I had no idea it was generating that junk. *sigh* I just filed http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/issues/detail?id=2240 - -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx71K0ACgkQ4v2HLvE71NVLWACfWbB1EJwwmKJvRil3O3L30bgw NXAAn344eFS3g/L1Bkgog4xGOiv/Tg85 =chRN -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/28/2010 10:46 PM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote: Well my main concern is exactly what you have stated If RH decide Fedora should go away it would in other words You exist only because we allow you to exist The former is a pretty strong statement the latter is my own interpretation of what you just stated. Fedora the name, and Fedora some of the current hardware resources, and Fedora some of the current warm bodies would go away, but not the code, many of the other people, the documentation, the mirrors, etc... I don't see any amount of trying to shadow corporate employees with community (what does that even mean?) making any amount of difference on this point. - -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx71WkACgkQ4v2HLvE71NXBegCeMQ+E08vvuEvZa1/qeqKqQYvC Gt4AoJYC2FUJ3+oKNha71eqgOgDbebMF =2XL0 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/28/2010 09:25 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: Jesse Keating wrote: The cynic in me would expect that the people who want something different than the fire hose we have now are silently leaving, and those that are left are going to say they like the deluge of updates. You say that as if it were a negative thing. To me it is. It's you and people like you that want to shove a ton of updates down the throats of our stable release users (including changes that alter behavior and sonames etc...) that have ruined the Fedora I helped to build. I want my Fedora back, I don't want what you're creating. It's actually very positive, it means we have found our niche and set some very specific expectations in our user base! We should stick to that and not suddenly turn around half-turn. We've found our niche, but chasing away our previous niche (and having less users show up in our tracking mechanism for it) It's getting to the point where me, as a long time Fedora developer and sometimes leader, is not enjoying using Fedora any more. Every update run can break things, and often does. Every update takes for ever because there are so many updates. Too many to review each one and see what it does, and how to maybe test it and provide feedback. Updates runs just get pushed off longer and longer so that I have a block of time to A) apply the damn things, and B) spend a few hours recovering from any sort of fallout in my workflow. If I don't enjoy using the product I'm creating, that doesn't bode well. - -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx71lsACgkQ4v2HLvE71NUnGQCfT5YAjnmAwonEmY55mM5sl73Q rl0AoLTO/Ze9fzkLBGnohyltNtjUupmz =Aec5 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:03 PM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@redhat.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/28/2010 09:25 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: Jesse Keating wrote: The cynic in me would expect that the people who want something different than the fire hose we have now are silently leaving, and those that are left are going to say they like the deluge of updates. You say that as if it were a negative thing. To me it is. It's you and people like you that want to shove a ton of updates down the throats of our stable release users (including changes that alter behavior and sonames etc...) that have ruined the Fedora I helped to build. I want my Fedora back, I don't want what you're creating. I have been using Fedora forever, and I have the exact opposite sentiment. I find that updates and too slow in coming. I feel that there are other distros for stable, slow releases. -- Fedora 13 (www.pembo13.com) -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@redhat.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/28/2010 09:25 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: Jesse Keating wrote: The cynic in me would expect that the people who want something different than the fire hose we have now are silently leaving, and those that are left are going to say they like the deluge of updates. You say that as if it were a negative thing. To me it is. It's you and people like you that want to shove a ton of updates down the throats of our stable release users (including changes that alter behavior and sonames etc...) that have ruined the Fedora I helped to build. I want my Fedora back, I don't want what you're creating. Interesting here is that one can say Leave the project if you don't like what we do (already done in the direction of Kevin Kofler) but the offer doesn't count for everybody. Not saying you should leave, for sure not. I think you're valuable for the project. The same counts by the way as well for Kevin and everyone else not sharing your opinion. It's actually very positive, it means we have found our niche and set some very specific expectations in our user base! We should stick to that and not suddenly turn around half-turn. We've found our niche, but chasing away our previous niche (and having less users show up in our tracking mechanism for it) What previous niche? It's getting to the point where me, as a long time Fedora developer and sometimes leader, is not enjoying using Fedora any more. Every update run can break things, and often does. Why not give QA the time to settle and find out how the new things work out? Every update takes for ever because there are so many updates. Too many to review each one and see what it does, and how to maybe test it and provide feedback. Updates runs just get pushed off longer and longer so that I have a block of time to A) apply the damn things, and B) spend a few hours recovering from any sort of fallout in my workflow. What DE is in use on your box? If I don't enjoy using the product I'm creating, that doesn't bode well. Well, it's not just you, creating it. BTW, the same feeling counts for everyone else. -- LG Thomas Dubium sapientiae initium -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 1:45 PM, Thomas Janssen thom...@fedoraproject.org wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@redhat.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/28/2010 09:25 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: Jesse Keating wrote: The cynic in me would expect that the people who want something different than the fire hose we have now are silently leaving, and those that are left are going to say they like the deluge of updates. You say that as if it were a negative thing. To me it is. It's you and people like you that want to shove a ton of updates down the throats of our stable release users (including changes that alter behavior and sonames etc...) that have ruined the Fedora I helped to build. I want my Fedora back, I don't want what you're creating. Interesting here is that one can say Leave the project if you don't like what we do (already done in the direction of Kevin Kofler) but the offer doesn't count for everybody. Not saying you should leave, for sure not. I think you're valuable for the project. The same counts by the way as well for Kevin and everyone else not sharing your opinion. It's actually very positive, it means we have found our niche and set some very specific expectations in our user base! We should stick to that and not suddenly turn around half-turn. We've found our niche, but chasing away our previous niche (and having less users show up in our tracking mechanism for it) What previous niche? Being a fast paced, bleeding edge distro -- what I always expected. - Fedora 13 (www.pembo13.com) -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:03, Jesse Keating jkeat...@redhat.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/28/2010 09:25 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: Jesse Keating wrote: The cynic in me would expect that the people who want something different than the fire hose we have now are silently leaving, and those that are left are going to say they like the deluge of updates. You say that as if it were a negative thing. To me it is. It's you and people like you that want to shove a ton of updates down the throats of our stable release users (including changes that alter behavior and sonames etc...) that have ruined the Fedora I helped to build. I want my Fedora back, I don't want what you're creating. The problem to quote a tv philosopher is: The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote. The changes towards a distribution that attracts people who live in the moment happened a while back, and has been building momentum for quite some time. Trying to erect barriers now is not going to help but make it so nothing exists afterwords. The things that can be done are: A) get out of the way, B) go with the flow, or C) figure out what you can build on top of it. [I am looking at option C] We've found our niche, but chasing away our previous niche (and having less users show up in our tracking mechanism for it) It's getting to the point where me, as a long time Fedora developer and sometimes leader, is not enjoying using Fedora any more. Every update run can What was our previous niche? That is what people seemed so hard to ever quantify beyond knowing what it isn't. The people I know who are running Ubuntu now instead of RHL or Fedora are doing it because that distribution 'fills in the blanks' for them that RHL/Fedora never seemed to answer. It has a vision, it has a single voice where they feel it is needed. Fedora has never been that. (heck even RHL was never that as you couldn't get any of the RH developers to agree on much :)). -- Stephen J Smoogen. “The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.” Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University. We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things. — Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 12:22 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote. The changes towards a distribution that attracts people who live in the moment happened a while back, and has been building momentum for quite some time. Trying to erect barriers now is not going to help but make it so nothing exists afterwords. The things that can be done are: A) get out of the way, B) go with the flow, or C) figure out what you can build on top of it. [I am looking at option C] We've found our niche, but chasing away our previous niche (and having less users show up in our tracking mechanism for it) It's getting to the point where me, as a long time Fedora developer and sometimes leader, is not enjoying using Fedora any more. Every update run can What was our previous niche? That is what people seemed so hard to ever quantify beyond knowing what it isn't. The people I know who are running Ubuntu now instead of RHL or Fedora are doing it because that distribution 'fills in the blanks' for them that RHL/Fedora never seemed to answer. It has a vision, it has a single voice where they feel it is needed. Fedora has never been that. (heck even RHL was never that as you couldn't get any of the RH developers to agree on much :)). I think the RHL niche was: 1. reasonably current 2. updated to a new release every 6months 3. supported for security/errata for 3yrs 4. free -sv -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
Gerard Braad (gbr...@fedoraproject.org) said: aggressively I do not agree this strategy is wise or even the correct way. Certain Fedora versions dropped hardware support. We can't dictate people wht they can or can not do. I still know people who run old redhat releases (5.x) as there was m68k support. archaeology hat on Red Hat Linux as released on the FTP site/boxed sets never directly supported m68k. There was a different product called 'Linux Rough Cuts', which were community ports to various architectures - the example I know of included PPC, m68k, MIPS, and UltraSparc (before UltraPenguin was merged in.) archaeology hat off Bill -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 09:03 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/28/2010 09:25 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: Jesse Keating wrote: The cynic in me would expect that the people who want something different than the fire hose we have now are silently leaving, and those that are left are going to say they like the deluge of updates. You say that as if it were a negative thing. To me it is. It's you and people like you that want to shove a ton of updates down the throats of our stable release users (including changes that alter behavior and sonames etc...) that have ruined the Fedora I helped to build. I want my Fedora back, I don't want what you're creating. Jesse is absolutely right on this point. Fedora is being ruined by this kind of behavior. You can have progress, cutting edge, etc. without having to be unstable and unpredictable in the process. It's called rawhide for a reason. It was always intended to be the place to dump things, but not in stable releases. Instead, we have people so opposed to a little sanity and so scared of 6 months wait - like anything really matters in that small a timeframe in the *real* world - that they want to cram things down the throats of the users. That works fine if you're in college and have a lot of free time, but some people like their computers to also work on a reasonably predictable basis, which is not the ride that is Fedora today. We've found our niche, but chasing away our previous niche (and having less users show up in our tracking mechanism for it) It's getting to the point where me, as a long time Fedora developer and sometimes leader, is not enjoying using Fedora any more. Every update run can break things, and often does. As I've said, on systems not directly connected I just don't bother doing updates ever. I suspect before too long some effort will get formed to do a more stable version of Fedora (no, this isn't any reference to Enterprise stuff - that's entirely different) and at that point I give it not a whole lot of time before people gravitate toward that, or there is some fragmentation, or something a lot worse. Every update takes for ever because there are so many updates. Too many to review each one and see what it does, and how to maybe test it and provide feedback. Updates runs just get pushed off longer and longer so that I have a block of time to A) apply the damn things, and B) spend a few hours recovering from any sort of fallout in my workflow. If I don't enjoy using the product I'm creating, that doesn't bode well. Again, I think everything you've said is well said, totally appropriate, and I'm grateful that you spoke up and said it. Because you are certainly far from being alone. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
Thomas Janssen thom...@fedoraproject.org wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@redhat.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/28/2010 09:25 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: Jesse Keating wrote: The cynic in me would expect that the people who want something different than the fire hose we have now are silently leaving, and those that are left are going to say they like the deluge of updates. You say that as if it were a negative thing. To me it is. It's you and people like you that want to shove a ton of updates down the throats of our stable release users (including changes that alter behavior and sonames etc...) that have ruined the Fedora I helped to build. I want my Fedora back, I don't want what you're creating. Interesting here is that one can say Leave the project if you don't like what we do (already done in the direction of Kevin Kofler) but the offer doesn't count for everybody. Not saying you should leave, for sure not. I think you're valuable for the project. The same counts by the way as well for Kevin and everyone else not sharing your opinion. It's actually very positive, it means we have found our niche and set some very specific expectations in our user base! We should stick to that and not suddenly turn around half-turn. We've found our niche, but chasing away our previous niche (and having less users show up in our tracking mechanism for it) What previous niche? We had a distro that was pretty general purpose, worked for servers and desktops and even laptops. We had a predictable schedule. We had new technology thanks to rawhide. We had timely bugfixes that didn't sacrifice stability, as in things didn't change out from under you on a stable release. We had an ecosystem of third parties that would build up stacks of newer things should a user be adventurous. We had a fresh release quite often that could be relied upon for at least a year. We had a culture of not just throwing crap over the wall at our users, which included ourselves. We had accountability when things did go awry and a honest effort to disrupt the users of our stable releases as little as possible. We also we're a very free distro avoiding nonfree stuff, and we worked well with upstreams. We we're easy to configure, easy to update, easy to install whether a single system or 400 systems in a lab. We we're easy to administrate in the same scenarios. This was fairly unique and what drew a lot of people to the project. It's getting to the point where me, as a long time Fedora developer and sometimes leader, is not enjoying using Fedora any more. Every update run can break things, and often does. Why not give QA the time to settle and find out how the new things work out? Because the likes of Kevin throw fits whenever we try to insert any QA time or seem to try and improve the quality of our updates in any way other than throw more of them at people. Every update takes for ever because there are so many updates. Too many to review each one and see what it does, and how to maybe test it and provide feedback. Updates runs just get pushed off longer and longer so that I have a block of time to A) apply the damn things, and B) spend a few hours recovering from any sort of fallout in my workflow. What DE is in use on your box? I use Gnome with some KDE apps. If I don't enjoy using the product I'm creating, that doesn't bode well. Well, it's not just you, creating it. BTW, the same feeling counts for everyone else. -- Sent from my Android phone. Please excuse my brevity. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:09:06 -0400 Jon Masters jonat...@jonmasters.org wrote: Every update takes for ever because there are so many updates. Too many to review each one and see what it does, and how to maybe test it and provide feedback. Updates runs just get pushed off longer and longer so that I have a block of time to A) apply the damn things, and B) spend a few hours recovering from any sort of fallout in my workflow. If I don't enjoy using the product I'm creating, that doesn't bode well. Again, I think everything you've said is well said, totally appropriate, and I'm grateful that you spoke up and said it. Because you are certainly far from being alone. I have to say the same, even as a developer, I can't have to stop every day to reboot or fix my machine while I am working on my own project. That's why I sometimes culpably delay to update my machine, until some scary security vulnerability appears (and then I have to do the *HUGE* update that follows). I am just glad I have a very fast connection at home right now, but if I had even a normal DSL like I used in my previous life (1/2 Mbit/s dload) I would have to seriously consider using a different distro for machines that are not throw-away. I *love* the cutting edge of Fedora when a *new* release comes out. But the amount of churn in *stable* releases, (ie gratuitous updates that do not really fix bugs just add new stuff (and often new bugs)) is a bit unsettling for people that actually use their computer to do work, as opposed to just try out new stuff every 2 days. Why people that love raw bleeding cutting edge can't simply use rawhide ? (Or pick the packages they like to test from there ?) Simo. -- Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:30, seth vidal skvi...@fedoraproject.org wrote: On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 12:22 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote. The changes towards a distribution that attracts people who live in the moment happened a while back, and has been building momentum for quite some time. Trying to erect barriers now is not going to help but make it so nothing exists afterwords. The things that can be done are: A) get out of the way, B) go with the flow, or C) figure out what you can build on top of it. [I am looking at option C] We've found our niche, but chasing away our previous niche (and having less users show up in our tracking mechanism for it) It's getting to the point where me, as a long time Fedora developer and sometimes leader, is not enjoying using Fedora any more. Every update run can What was our previous niche? That is what people seemed so hard to ever quantify beyond knowing what it isn't. The people I know who are running Ubuntu now instead of RHL or Fedora are doing it because that distribution 'fills in the blanks' for them that RHL/Fedora never seemed to answer. It has a vision, it has a single voice where they feel it is needed. Fedora has never been that. (heck even RHL was never that as you couldn't get any of the RH developers to agree on much :)). I think the RHL niche was: 1. reasonably current actually from our tickets that was always just behind. :). 2. updated to a new release every 6months 3. supported for security/errata for 3yrs That long? It never seemed that long. From my recollection it was until the next .2 release came out. So 4.2 was EOL'd shortly after 5.2, 5.2 shortly after 6.2, and 6.2 shortly after 7.2. [yes there was a 7.3 but it wasn't supposed to be there :). ] This would give us about 18 months per .2 release. 4. free 5. About 1/5th the size of Fedora. Not that being smaller is a bad thing but it was always a bunch of work to figure out what new stuff to pull in. -- Stephen J Smoogen. “The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.” Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University. We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things. — Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 03:09:06PM -0400, Jon Masters wrote: Fedora is being ruined by this kind of behavior. You can have progress, cutting edge, etc. without having to be unstable and unpredictable in the process. A lot has been done in the last couple of months in that direction. Proventesters and no more updates directly to stable are there now, repos.fpo is gaining traction and AutoQA is hopefully coming real soon now too. Compared to the F7 - F13 timeframe these are already quite intrusive changes. How about giving it a release to see how those changes work out before pushing for even more radical changes? Also - and this is a question that I have asked myself and others a couple of times - if you could implement Fedora the way you want: What unique selling points are left for Fedora? Fedora is Ubuntu with rpm sounds about as bad as Fedora is broken most of the time (not that I feel it is). As I've said, on systems not directly connected I just don't bother doing updates ever. I suspect before too long some effort will get formed to do a more stable version of Fedora Don't we already have that in F n-1? -- sven === jabber/xmpp: s...@lankes.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:36:42PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: We had a distro that was pretty general purpose, worked for servers and desktops and even laptops. We had a predictable schedule. We had new technology thanks to rawhide. We had timely bugfixes that didn't sacrifice stability, as in things didn't change out from under you on a stable release. We had an ecosystem of third parties that would build up stacks of newer things should a user be adventurous. We had a fresh release quite often that could be relied upon for at least a year. We had a culture of not just throwing crap over the wall at our users, which included ourselves. We had accountability when things did go awry and a honest effort to disrupt the users of our stable releases as little as possible. We also we're a very free distro avoiding nonfree stuff, and we worked well with upstreams. We we're easy to configure, easy to update, easy to install whether a single system or 400 systems in a lab. We we're easy to administrate in the same scenarios. This sounds like an excellent definition for what Fedora should be. -- Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional Research Computing Services Harvard School of Engineering Applied Sciences -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:36:42PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: Why not give QA the time to settle and find out how the new things work out? Because the likes of Kevin throw fits whenever we try to insert any QA time or seem to try and improve the quality of our updates in any way other than throw more of them at people. So you're saying we cannot test the new qa and update-process 'achievements' for a while because Kevin doesn't like them? -- sven === jabber/xmpp: s...@lankes.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 21:56 +0200, Sven Lankes wrote: As I've said, on systems not directly connected I just don't bother doing updates ever. I suspect before too long some effort will get formed to do a more stable version of Fedora Don't we already have that in F n-1? Even that isn't left alone. And it's only supported for 6 months, assuming one does choose to apply updates. The thing is, I want to keep up with what's happening, both for personal interest, and for other reasons, but as it is, the churn is plain nuts. Sure, I can give it a release, but I have been giving it a release for some time now. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 21:56:17 +0200, Sven Lankes s...@lank.es wrote: Also - and this is a question that I have asked myself and others a couple of times - if you could implement Fedora the way you want: What unique selling points are left for Fedora? Fedora is Ubuntu with rpm sounds about as bad as Fedora is broken most of the time (not that I feel it is). Freedom Lots of packages Easy to contribute to Up to date at release New technologies (e.g. selinux, systemd, pulseaudio) Just works (except for patented media codecs while waiting for sane patent laws) -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 12:36 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: We had a distro that was pretty general purpose, worked for servers and desktops and even laptops. We had a predictable schedule. It's called Laissez-faire meets reality. Right now we have a lot of free market philosophy in Fedora that basically says if everything is left alone then good things will magically happen, sum is greater than the parts, yada yada yada. Insert some reference to Cathedral and Bazaar and the implication that only Microsoft and - oh no - corporations would have a heavy hand in overall cohesion, and you've got the mindset about how it is now, at least from how I see it. That is a great college mindset that works great for individual silos and experimentation. The problem is, there are a lot of things that are decidedly unsexy in anything, in particular having a product like Fedora be complete, free of regressions, and overall provide a consistent experience. All of those things won't just happen without a heavy mandate this is how it is, this is what we do, and no you can't do that. We need to say no much more often, and view everything in the context of the project, rather than just a test vehicle for some pet project that was fun. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@j2solutions.net wrote: Thomas Janssen thom...@fedoraproject.org wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Jesse Keating jkeat...@redhat.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/28/2010 09:25 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: Jesse Keating wrote: The cynic in me would expect that the people who want something different than the fire hose we have now are silently leaving, and those that are left are going to say they like the deluge of updates. You say that as if it were a negative thing. To me it is. It's you and people like you that want to shove a ton of updates down the throats of our stable release users (including changes that alter behavior and sonames etc...) that have ruined the Fedora I helped to build. I want my Fedora back, I don't want what you're creating. Interesting here is that one can say Leave the project if you don't like what we do (already done in the direction of Kevin Kofler) but the offer doesn't count for everybody. Not saying you should leave, for sure not. I think you're valuable for the project. The same counts by the way as well for Kevin and everyone else not sharing your opinion. It's actually very positive, it means we have found our niche and set some very specific expectations in our user base! We should stick to that and not suddenly turn around half-turn. We've found our niche, but chasing away our previous niche (and having less users show up in our tracking mechanism for it) What previous niche? We had a distro that was pretty general purpose, worked for servers and desktops and even laptops. We had a predictable schedule. We had new technology thanks to rawhide. We had timely bugfixes that didn't sacrifice stability, as in things didn't change out from under you on a stable release. We had an ecosystem of third parties that would build up stacks of newer things should a user be adventurous. We had a fresh release quite often that could be relied upon for at least a year. We had a culture of not just throwing crap over the wall at our users, which included ourselves. We had accountability when things did go awry and a honest effort to disrupt the users of our stable releases as little as possible. We also we're a very free distro avoiding nonfree stuff, and we worked well with upstreams. We we're easy to configure, easy to update, easy to install whether a single system or 400 systems in a lab. We we're easy to administrate in the same scenarios. This was fairly unique and what drew a lot of people to the project. Is this still unique? -- Fedora 13 (www.pembo13.com) -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:04:40 -0400 Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:36:42PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: We had a distro that was pretty general purpose, worked for servers and desktops and even laptops. We had a predictable schedule. We had new technology thanks to rawhide. We had timely bugfixes that didn't sacrifice stability, as in things didn't change out from under you on a stable release. We had an ecosystem of third parties that would build up stacks of newer things should a user be adventurous. We had a fresh release quite often that could be relied upon for at least a year. We had a culture of not just throwing crap over the wall at our users, which included ourselves. We had accountability when things did go awry and a honest effort to disrupt the users of our stable releases as little as possible. We also we're a very free distro avoiding nonfree stuff, and we worked well with upstreams. We we're easy to configure, easy to update, easy to install whether a single system or 400 systems in a lab. We we're easy to administrate in the same scenarios. This sounds like an excellent definition for what Fedora should be. aolMe too/aol I would love to see us work back toward the above where we are no longer doing so. kevin signature.asc Description: PGP signature -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
Once upon a time, Sven Lankes s...@lank.es said: Also - and this is a question that I have asked myself and others a couple of times - if you could implement Fedora the way you want: What unique selling points are left for Fedora? Fedora is Ubuntu with rpm sounds about as bad as Fedora is broken most of the time (not that I feel it is). I guess I've never been concerned about unique selling points. Why should it be Fedora is Ubuntu with RPM, instead of Ubuntu is Fedora with DEB? IIRC Fedora came first (and certainly RHL came before Ubuntu, although Debian was little before RHL). I like Fedora because it is free and Free. The development is handled by a community, not just a single company. Also, RHEL is developed out of Fedora, and I use RHEL on my servers at work, so Fedora is a bit like a window into the future of RHEL. I first moved from Slackware to RHL (3.0.3 in 1996!) after having built a system of my own from the ground up (compiling everything from source manually, keeping notes along the way). I appreciated how RPM worked immediately after that experience. When I found bugs and emailed them to Red Hat, somebody fixed them. Once RH BZ was set up, I opened a bunch of early bugs (5 of the first 60, several including patches), and generally got a good response. I worked with the RHL Betas for a few years, until this crazy experiment of a community distribution called Fedora came along. I like the release schedule of Fedora, but I don't like the idea of each release continuing to be a rolling update target. I don't really understand why about six months (or less if you didn't install on release day) is such a horrible wait to make big changes to the system. If the up-to-six month wait is the problem, I'd rather see more releases (e.g. Fedora 14.1: Now with GNOME3!) with more targeted/focused changes. That's probably not practical with the available manpower however. Why do we need to be concerned about being similar to or different from Ubuntu? -- Chris Adams cmad...@hiwaay.net Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Fri, 2010-08-27 at 18:49 -0400, Jon Masters wrote: On Fri, 2010-08-27 at 15:47 -0700, Bob Arendt wrote: I think it would be much better for Fedora to decide what it *should* be, specifically what the Fedora userspace should be, and excel at that. Don't follow the market or worry about being the most popular distro (unless that's really a goal ..?) Decide the niche, and be strong in that niche. That is also an acceptable outcome. What is not acceptable is the current status quo. We either ask our users what they want and do that, or very explicitly state This is Fedora, this is what is does, this is who are userbase is, and this is what we offer. I actually think your survey request should happen either way. Even if Fedora says up-front Our goals are X, Y, and Z, and every decision we take is aimed at reaching those goals (whether it's be on the bleeding edge, or whatever), the feedback from users is crucial in determining whether or not those goals are being met. Cheers Alex -- This message was scanned by Better Hosted and is believed to be clean. http://www.betterhosted.com -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 16:01 -0500, Chris Adams wrote: I like the release schedule of Fedora, but I don't like the idea of each release continuing to be a rolling update target. I don't really understand why about six months (or less if you didn't install on release day) is such a horrible wait to make big changes to the system. Agreed. Why do we need to be concerned about being similar to or different from Ubuntu? Agreed. -sv -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
Jon Masters píše v Po 30. 08. 2010 v 16:13 -0400: On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 12:36 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: We had a distro that was pretty general purpose, worked for servers and desktops and even laptops. We had a predictable schedule. It's called Laissez-faire meets reality. Right now we have a lot of free market philosophy in Fedora that basically says if everything is left alone then good things will magically happen, sum is greater than the parts, yada yada yada. Too many labels, too little predictive value... Let's talk specifically about incentives instead. If interested Linux developers meet to create a distribution because they want to, you'll inevitably get an updates firehose: A typical developer wants the dependencies of the software they are working on to be _very_ up to date - probably not the upstream development version, but the upstream maintenance version with _all_ current bug fixes. Waiting 6 months for a bug fix does not make sense - at that point the developer would be tempted to build the new version locally. So, web developers want latest httpd/PHP/Rails/MySQL; GNOME developers want latest gtk/libgnome*; and so on. Similarly, everyone who cares about the tools they use daily (which developers tend to), wants the best versions of these tools, as soon as it is practical. So, newest version of emacs/vim/kdevelop/... [Some people develop low-level software against glibc, and haven't changed their development environment for years; for them the flow of updates really is not that interesting, and it seems superfluous.] Saying use rawhide is not helpful, because rawhide is very often broken. A stable release that breaks a specific component for a few days is acceptable - if this is not a component one uses for development, it doesn't matter; if this is such a component, one knows about it well enough to be able to revert an update or to contribute a fix. When a large number of Fedora contributions are not paid to do so, they naturally write a distribution _for themselves_. Why would they not? That means that updates will be frequent; few maintainers would push updates they consider too risky, but some risk is acceptable. The updates firehose for components one does not much care about is a minor risk, compared to the commit firehose for a mid-size program on which one collaborates with two or more other people. The result is a distribution on which it is reasonably easy to develop current software, and a distribution on which one might not update critical system updates on the night before giving a presentation on a conference (FWIW, I can't recall a really bad updates experience). That doesn't seem to be a bad tradeoff - for a developer. Now, if we Fedora should be a distribution that developers enjoy using, there will be an updates firehose - and most developers won't mind too much. If Fedora should be a distribution that developers can install on their grandparents' computers, developers won't enjoy working on the distribution so much - both because this requires bureaucracy, and because the result is not as interesting a distribution - and either the quality and size of the distribution will suffer, or there will have to be another motivation for many people to participate. So, does Fedora want to be a place where interested Linux developers meet to create a distribution they enjoy, or a project where people who are for some reason compelled to create a distribution for others collaborate on it? What Fedora advertised is ..., Features, First - that's a developer's distro; Fedora was never M million happy users, growing X% annually. Mirek -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 04:01:25PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote: I guess I've never been concerned about unique selling points. Why should it be Fedora is Ubuntu with RPM, instead of Ubuntu is Fedora with DEB? IIRC Fedora came first (and certainly RHL came before Ubuntu, although Debian was little before RHL). That doesn't matter much. Ubuntu is where the users are. Why do we need to be concerned about being similar to or different from Ubuntu? For me that question is interesting because selling Fedora is what I do at FLOSS-events as a Fedora ambassador and 'what is the difference to ubuntu' is the number one question. This should certainly not affect the direction we're taking with Fedora as it's marketing and marketing needs to market whatever is there - but I still find the question interesting. -- sven === jabber/xmpp: s...@lankes.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 23:11 +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote: Now, if we Fedora should be a distribution that developers enjoy using, there will be an updates firehose - and most developers won't mind too much. If Fedora should be a distribution that developers can install on their grandparents' computers, developers won't enjoy working on the distribution so much - both because this requires bureaucracy, and because the result is not as interesting a distribution - and either the quality and size of the distribution will suffer, or there will have to be another motivation for many people to participate. Why does it have to be one or the other? There are ways to do both with vitualization, separate stream of packages, multiple versions of the same thing. Who knows what else. The point is, nobody is saying you can't take a stable base and add in more recent bits for your area of interest if six months really is too long for you to wait. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
Jon Masters wrote: Why does it have to be one or the other? There are ways to do both with vitualization, separate stream of packages, multiple versions of the same thing. Who knows what else. The point is, nobody is saying you can't take a stable base and add in more recent bits for your area of interest if six months really is too long for you to wait. Jon, you seem hard set on your ways. You, rudely, snipped a well articulated e-mail down to what you want to pick a fight about. Why are we even continuing this discussion? Fedora will be made by the people that make it. I happily contribute as a QA person and now as a package maintainer. You should be happy that more and more people are getting on board for open source development instead of telling everyone to wait their turn. Yes, there is a compromise between Kevin Kofler and Jon Masters. It's called Fedora. Let Fedora 14 ride and watch the new policies unfurl (as many others have already stated). -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Chris Adams cmad...@hiwaay.net wrote: Once upon a time, Sven Lankes s...@lank.es said: Also - and this is a question that I have asked myself and others a couple of times - if you could implement Fedora the way you want: What unique selling points are left for Fedora? Fedora is Ubuntu with rpm sounds about as bad as Fedora is broken most of the time (not that I feel it is). I guess I've never been concerned about unique selling points. Why should it be Fedora is Ubuntu with RPM, instead of Ubuntu is Fedora with DEB? IIRC Fedora came first (and certainly RHL came before Ubuntu, although Debian was little before RHL). Because people seem to identify Ubuntu with what is being described. Why do we need to be concerned about being similar to or different from Ubuntu? Well for one, if there is nothing different mission wise between Fedora and Ubuntu, but Ubuntu gets more attention from desktop users, then people might as well just all use Ubuntu. I'm not sure that there is room for a Coke vs. Pepsi in Linux distros. A fruit juice vs. soda seems more useful. -- Fedora 13 (www.pembo13.com) -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
Jon Masters píše v Po 30. 08. 2010 v 17:17 -0400: On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 23:11 +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote: Now, if we Fedora should be a distribution that developers enjoy using, there will be an updates firehose - and most developers won't mind too much. If Fedora should be a distribution that developers can install on their grandparents' computers, developers won't enjoy working on the distribution so much - both because this requires bureaucracy, and because the result is not as interesting a distribution - and either the quality and size of the distribution will suffer, or there will have to be another motivation for many people to participate. Why does it have to be one or the other? There are ways to do both with vitualization, separate stream of packages, multiple versions of the same thing. Who knows what else. The point is, nobody is saying you can't take a stable base and add in more recent bits for your area of interest if six months really is too long for you to wait. Because all these options require additional work from _each additional user_. Or do we form 2048 specialized Fedora repos, one for each set of interesting packages? That just doesn't work. Mirek -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
rawhide rocks! [was Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)]
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:11:06PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote: A typical developer wants the dependencies of the software they are working on to be _very_ up to date - probably not the upstream development version, but the upstream maintenance version with _all_ current bug fixes. Waiting 6 months for a bug fix does not make sense - at that point the developer would be tempted to build the new version locally. [...] Saying use rawhide is not helpful, because rawhide is very often broken. I've been running rawhide as my primary desktop OS at work for a couple of years now. During that time, it's only broken so as to cause me as much as a couple of hours work twice. That seems like a small price to pay for being on the extreme leading edge as you describe. And now with the no frozen rawhide feature, I expect it to be even more stable. A stable release that breaks a specific component for a few days is acceptable - if this is not a component one uses for development, it doesn't matter; if this is such a component, one knows about it well enough to be able to revert an update or to contribute a fix. There you go! That's what we have in Rawhide. Maybe the problem here is that we need to market Rawhide better to Fedora developers. -- Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional Research Computing Services Harvard School of Engineering Applied Sciences -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: rawhide rocks! [was Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)]
Matthew Miller píše v Po 30. 08. 2010 v 18:56 -0400: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:11:06PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote: A typical developer wants the dependencies of the software they are working on to be _very_ up to date - probably not the upstream development version, but the upstream maintenance version with _all_ current bug fixes. Waiting 6 months for a bug fix does not make sense - at that point the developer would be tempted to build the new version locally. [...] Saying use rawhide is not helpful, because rawhide is very often broken. I've been running rawhide as my primary desktop OS at work for a couple of years now. During that time, it's only broken so as to cause me as much as a couple of hours work twice. That seems like a small price to pay for being on the extreme leading edge as you describe. Curious. My experience from using the latest Fedora (often updating on the date of GA release) is very similar. I sometimes wonder what the other users of Fedora are doing that the updates firehose is such a problem... A stable release that breaks a specific component for a few days is acceptable - if this is not a component one uses for development, it doesn't matter; if this is such a component, one knows about it well enough to be able to revert an update or to contribute a fix. There you go! That's what we have in Rawhide. No, for rawhide to really be useful, it must be possible to put unfinished system-wide changes in there: it would be pretty much impossible to integrate systemd into the distribution on a branch, and to add it into rawhide only after everything works 100%. rawhide is here to allow integration of 80% working but not finished code, and polishing it. As such, it is unavoidably dangerous, even if it may often work out fine. What I was talking about originally is not 80% working but not finished, but as far as we know 100% working, but not tested by a RHEL-equivalent QA process including two beta releases over 6 months. Mirek -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: rawhide rocks! [was Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)]
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 15:56, Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:11:06PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote: A typical developer wants the dependencies of the software they are working on to be _very_ up to date - probably not the upstream development version, but the upstream maintenance version with _all_ current bug fixes. Waiting 6 months for a bug fix does not make sense - at that point the developer would be tempted to build the new version locally. [...] Saying use rawhide is not helpful, because rawhide is very often broken. I've been running rawhide as my primary desktop OS at work for a couple of years now. During that time, it's only broken so as to cause me as much as a couple of hours work twice. That seems like a small price to pay for being on the extreme leading edge as you describe. And now with the no frozen rawhide feature, I expect it to be even more stable. I've moved from being a rawhide junkie to a koji junkie. I've been in that mode for the last five or six years. My experience has been that rawhide is most unstable just around alpha time. There are typically lots of regressions in rawhide. I can expect that (suspend/resume, printing, usb key mounting, X, compix, control panels, et al) are broken on a regular basis. Maybe we should start a self-help group for those of us with this affliction. I'm more surprised that the package owners haven't found a better way to make use of us yet. I choose to live with the regressions. Most users of Fedora are probably interested in a far more stable system. darrell -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: rawhide rocks! [was Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)]
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 01:05:34AM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote: No, for rawhide to really be useful, it must be possible to put unfinished system-wide changes in there: it would be pretty much impossible to integrate systemd into the distribution on a branch, and to add it into rawhide only after everything works 100%. rawhide is here to allow integration of 80% working but not finished code, and polishing it. As such, it is unavoidably dangerous, even if it may often work out fine. Well, actually, see some earlier posts here on this. As it's currently working, things aren't pushed to Rawhide after they've been through F14 testing. -- Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional Research Computing Services Harvard School of Engineering Applied Sciences -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: rawhide rocks! [was Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)]
On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 04:30:44PM -0700, darrell pfeifer wrote: I've moved from being a rawhide junkie to a koji junkie. I've been in that mode for the last five or six years. My experience has been that rawhide is most unstable just around alpha time. That is no longer the case. See: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/No_Frozen_Rawhide_Proposal -- Matthew Miller mat...@mattdm.org Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional Research Computing Services Harvard School of Engineering Applied Sciences -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: rawhide rocks! [was Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)]
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 19:52 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 04:30:44PM -0700, darrell pfeifer wrote: I've moved from being a rawhide junkie to a koji junkie. I've been in that mode for the last five or six years. My experience has been that rawhide is most unstable just around alpha time. That is no longer the case. See: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/No_Frozen_Rawhide_Proposal Actually, you want No_Frozen_Rawhide_Implementation. I made a link just now from No_Frozen_Rawhide since there's no way I would have thought to add Proposal or Implementation on the end when looking it up and I knew it was there to start with. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 18:58 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:11:06PM +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote: What Fedora advertised is ..., Features, First - that's a developer's distro; Fedora was never M million happy users, growing X% annually. For what it's worth: the current statement on the Fedora target audience includes: familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer. And also (on computer friendly): Our community is made up of people, by and large, who are very tech savvy. The longer people have been involved in the Fedora community, typically the more expertise they accrue on Linux and specifically Fedora. However, our user base does not necessarily share this level of expertise. We do not assume Fedora users are skilled developers or hackers, although certainly some are. See also the following things we apparently don't expect users to be able to do (linked from the User_base page on the wiki): Mitigates unexpected changes in existing software Know where to find software for testing Understand how to select or install testing software And furthermore, from general productivity user: When the user does not choose that path, though, we should take care not to inflict those effects on the user. Accustomization is part of the user's comfort with the system, no matter what the skill level. Unexpected changes disrupt the user's accustomed environment and might cause doubt in the stability of the system and the Fedora Project's ability to manage it. Great stuff. And there's more in there too. So the current User_base in addition to being not very well linked and referenced could hardly be described as reflecting all of the views in this particular thread. When the target audience is (re)defined soon, hopefully this documentation can be updated to reflect reality also. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Sat, 2010-08-28 at 16:40 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote: So let me ask you this who's your backup ( given that you at least have one within Red Hat ) and can a community member step in you're shoes to full fill your role in your absence? Dennis is his backup (RH employee) and if need be I know jwb (not redhat employee) is more than capable of handling these problems. Believe it or Worth noting Jesse was actually off work for most of the Alpha release period: almost all the Alpha test and RC composes were done by Dennis. Obviously it worked well if you don't know this until we tell you ;) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:11:06 +0200, you wrote: A typical developer wants the dependencies of the software they are working on to be _very_ up to date - probably not the upstream development version, but the upstream maintenance version with _all_ current bug fixes. Waiting 6 months for a bug fix does not make sense - at that point the developer would be tempted to build the new version locally. While I admit I haven't followed things very closely, I don't believe anyone is saying don't issue bugfixes. What is being said is don't upgrade versions just because something newer and shinier comes along in the middle of a release. So in other words, dependency 1.6 to 1.6.1 is okay as it is likely a bug fix, but 1.6 to 1.8 is not okay because it is a new release. So, web developers want latest httpd/PHP/Rails/MySQL; GNOME developers want latest gtk/libgnome*; and so on. I wouldn't be so sure about that. If I was developing a web application I would want my version of httpd/PHP/Rails/MySQL to remain stable - the last thing I want is a bug to appear in the application I am writing and have to wonder if it is a problem with my code or did the update in my framework change something on me. Similarly, if I develop a desktop app then I want gtk and the Gnome libraries (or Qt and the KDE libraries) to remain stable under me so I don't have to wonder where the errors are coming from. If on the other hand I am actually developing Gnome, then yes I want the latest gtk etc., but that is why a project like Gnome has jhbuild to make it easy for the developers to keep to the bleeding edge of the Gnome stack without disturbing everyone else. Similarly, everyone who cares about the tools they use daily (which developers tend to), wants the best versions of these tools, as soon as it is practical. So, newest version of emacs/vim/kdevelop/... Again, as a developer I would disagree. Unless the latest emacs/vim/debugger etc. offer a new feature that is going to save me time I want things to remain consistent. Upgrading brings the risk of a new bug that interupts my ability to work. This is something that should only be done at a new release, so there are no unexpected surprises to me as I try to balance keeping my system secure with bug fixes and actually getting the work I want to do done. Saying use rawhide is not helpful, because rawhide is very often broken. A stable release that breaks a specific component for a few days is acceptable - if this is not a component one uses for development, it doesn't matter; if this is such a component, one knows about it well enough to be able to revert an update or to contribute a fix. Ironically you have actually just described rawhide. Despite the reputation rawhide very rarely breaks for more than a day or 2 at a time, the usual issue is more that upgrades won't happen because of dependency issues that can take a while to sort out. But those don't make the system unusable. When a large number of Fedora contributions are not paid to do so, they naturally write a distribution _for themselves_. Why would they not? That means that updates will be frequent; few maintainers would push updates they consider too risky, but some risk is acceptable. The updates firehose for components one does not much care about is a minor risk, compared to the commit firehose for a mid-size program on which one collaborates with two or more other people. The problem is there is too much to a system that you do care about, whether it be your desktop environment, an email program, X, the kernel, etc. that end up getting pulled out from underneath you as you try to do your work that isn't related to them. The result is a distribution on which it is reasonably easy to develop current software, and a distribution on which one might not update critical system updates on the night before giving a presentation on a conference (FWIW, I can't recall a really bad updates experience). That doesn't seem to be a bad tradeoff - for a developer. So lets see, you are going to give a presentation or attend a conference, where you will likely be using an unsecured network with many threats that likely don't exist in your home or office environment, and you are saying that because we have a distrubition where anything can change and possibly break things you think it is okay that you have to forgo critical system updates that might prevent your system from being hacked? How can that be viewed as an acceptable tradeoff? What Fedora advertised is ..., Features, First - that's a developer's distro; Fedora was never M million happy users, growing X% annually. Actually, Fedora was. Fedora initially followed on from Red Hat Linux and was stable between releases, but this has gradually changed with time. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 23:56 -0400, Arthur Pemberton wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:09 PM, Gerald Henriksen ghenr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:11:06 +0200, you wrote: A typical developer wants the dependencies of the software they are working on to be _very_ up to date - probably not the upstream development version, but the upstream maintenance version with _all_ current bug fixes. Waiting 6 months for a bug fix does not make sense - at that point the developer would be tempted to build the new version locally. While I admit I haven't followed things very closely, I don't believe anyone is saying don't issue bugfixes. What is being said is don't upgrade versions just because something newer and shinier comes along in the middle of a release. So in other words, dependency 1.6 to 1.6.1 is okay as it is likely a bug fix, but 1.6 to 1.8 is not okay because it is a new release. 6 months for new features in a fast paced distro? You know, compared to almost any other Operating System out there, 6 months is warp speed. I'd rather have fewer features in my stable install that worked just right, then get shiny new things and deal with some brokenness in return at a defined point in the future. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 8/30/10 8:56 PM, Arthur Pemberton wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:09 PM, Gerald Henriksen ghenr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:11:06 +0200, you wrote: A typical developer wants the dependencies of the software they are working on to be _very_ up to date - probably not the upstream development version, but the upstream maintenance version with _all_ current bug fixes. Waiting 6 months for a bug fix does not make sense - at that point the developer would be tempted to build the new version locally. While I admit I haven't followed things very closely, I don't believe anyone is saying don't issue bugfixes. What is being said is don't upgrade versions just because something newer and shinier comes along in the middle of a release. So in other words, dependency 1.6 to 1.6.1 is okay as it is likely a bug fix, but 1.6 to 1.8 is not okay because it is a new release. 6 months for new features in a fast paced distro? New features hit rawhide all the time, with no waiting period. The fact that we can get a reasonably stable release out every 6 months including all these new features is pretty fast paced and amazing. I just want to keep that hard work relevant 1, 2, and 13 months after we make that release. - -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx8hCcACgkQ4v2HLvE71NXxXgCgs3nzizN8sgDxxXFLdN/On9D4 TOEAnimkbGlDK/Vd2e5QJJ9VkS6E84/a =7B90 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 8/30/10 1:33 PM, Arthur Pemberton wrote: Is this still unique? I believe it is, particularly with our attention to freedom and upstream relationships, and our connection to arguably /the/ premiere enterprise Linux offering. - -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx8hssACgkQ4v2HLvE71NVE4ACdEY9OpsgBCSJ41y/+ifsYg/xA AssAn2cq5iQ5FB/20WdiW9xw8g0c+JvK =txgZ -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 8/30/10 1:06 PM, Sven Lankes wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:36:42PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: Why not give QA the time to settle and find out how the new things work out? Because the likes of Kevin throw fits whenever we try to insert any QA time or seem to try and improve the quality of our updates in any way other than throw more of them at people. So you're saying we cannot test the new qa and update-process 'achievements' for a while because Kevin doesn't like them? I'm saying that these changes were made in the face of extreme resistance on Kevin's (and other's) parts. So whatever the outcome it's already going counter to the Fedora that he would like to see, or continue seeing. - -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx8iDkACgkQ4v2HLvE71NVavACgsp6IrANe5Z7MQ2T8kT475AGC YMgAn31XiShtXwfes2yBxASO2dEff9cE =HiR1 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 12:10 AM, Jon Masters jonat...@jonmasters.org wrote: On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 23:56 -0400, Arthur Pemberton wrote: On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:09 PM, Gerald Henriksen ghenr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:11:06 +0200, you wrote: A typical developer wants the dependencies of the software they are working on to be _very_ up to date - probably not the upstream development version, but the upstream maintenance version with _all_ current bug fixes. Waiting 6 months for a bug fix does not make sense - at that point the developer would be tempted to build the new version locally. While I admit I haven't followed things very closely, I don't believe anyone is saying don't issue bugfixes. What is being said is don't upgrade versions just because something newer and shinier comes along in the middle of a release. So in other words, dependency 1.6 to 1.6.1 is okay as it is likely a bug fix, but 1.6 to 1.8 is not okay because it is a new release. 6 months for new features in a fast paced distro? You know, compared to almost any other Operating System out there, 6 months is warp speed. I'd rather have fewer features in my stable install that worked just right, then get shiny new things and deal with some brokenness in return at a defined point in the future. So far the only brokeness I have had in all of F13 is with `seabios-bin`. -- Fedora 13 (www.pembo13.com) -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
