Benjamin Franz wrote:
On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
New, untested things have to appear first somewhere. What do you
think would be more effective?
I kind of like the vibrancy of the Ubuntu community: People have new
ideas and they spinoff 'Edubuntu', 'Nubuntu', 'Ubuntu CE', 'Kubuntu',
'Xubuntu', and so on.
This has more to do with squeezing everything on one disk and having to
choose what to eliminate. It doesn't address the new application version
issue. Where do you introduce major-version jumps the first time?
> Good ideas spread and come back. Classic 'Bazaar'
to Fedora's 'Cathedral'. You don't see a lot of 'spinoff' from Fedora
because Redhat has clutched it too close to themselves. If you have a
strong enough base community and loose enough control, experimentation
happens automatically.
You don't generally need spinoffs from fedora because you can install
whatever you want from the extras and 3rd party repositories.
Does the number of fedora users that aren't going to report bugs
matters to anyone?
Emphatically: Yes!
Developers and testers are *part* of an eco-system which is ultimately
based on and dependant on end users. End users will always heavily
out-number developers and testers, and they _should_.
I guess I didn't phrase that very well. What I meant was that you seem
to be saying that to get more users, the distro should try to become
more stable. The only way that can happen is to backport bug fixes made
for the current application versions into the old distro versions,
trying not to change any behavior. This is a big waste of time for no
particular return since it is already being done for RHEL.
What you _as a developer_ want are bug reports and fixes. But you aren't
going to get them unless you have enough end users to form the
eco-system that testers and developers spring from. To expect otherwise
is to think that you can raise a crop without the field below it.
What good would it do anyone to have a bug report for FC4 coming in now
when current development has moved on long ago? The developers of the
thousands of programs included in an FC distribution don't develop for
any particular distribution or version, they just keep fixing and adding
stuff. Fedora's purpose is best served by staying as close to the
current development work as possible instead of backporting fixes to a
whole set of releases that are now ancient history.
There is RHEL if you need and can afford support and CentOS if you
don't/can't. A CentOS user is just as much or more a potential future
RHEL customer as a fedora user - and RH doesn't get paid any more if
use fedora. They need people who use and test the added features, but
what do they gain by doing the extra work of backporting fixes into
yet another old version.
A large eco-system from which test reporters, bug fixes, developers and
new ideas spring.
Why would these people wanting new ideas be interested in running old
stable releases?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
