On 12/10/2015 07:21 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
If the bulk of the developers working on Fedora use laptops as their platform then, inevitably, Fedora will become in essence a laptop distribution and RHEL will follow.
Surely you're not suggesting that the code a developer writes is dependent on the form factor of the computer on which they write it? I'm sure that idea would shock nearly all of the developers of software for both rack mounted servers and embedded devices.
I think it's likely that, instead, you believe that you are representative of all of the people who do your job, and that features which you do not need are therefore not needed by others. That logic is quite normal, but completely wrong.
Take for instance your opinion of power management for NICs. While power management is important to mobile, battery-operated devices, it is also desirable in large data centers. Cooling and power use are big issues for data centers, and that feature was intended for that environment. You dismiss it as laptop-oriented technology, but not all system administrators do.
A handful of voices representing server installations, who by definition are not development types
"By definition?" Have you heard of DevOps? Whatever your opinion of that idea, there are definitely server admins who take part in development at all levels of the stack.
A server based distro to us has certain characteristics that are orientated to long running processes and system uptimes measured in months if not years. I have given up counting how many times I have to reboot all of our CentOS servers in the past year because of updates.
I share that frustration, but it has nothing to do with whether or not Fedora developers use laptops. The truth is simply that software becomes more complex over time, that there is a growing value in attacking computer systems, and that the world is increasingly connected. These things act together to create a situation where bugs are more likely in the core components, where it's harder to update a system without fully rebooting it.
But there's hope. There are a number of efforts to produce a system to update the kernel without reboots (ksplice, kgraft, kpatch, and KernelCare). More developers are writing unit tests. Code analysis tools are improving. Both the number of bugs produced and the cost of fixing them are getting better over time, too.
We do not need plug-and-play; or usb hot-swapping; or hibernation; or screen savers; or audio-video players; or power optimisation.
That's great for you, but some of those things are really valuable for system admins, especially those who run *really large* numbers of systems. Power and cooling cost money, so optimization has a lot of value. A lot of those plug-and-play and hot-swapping technologies that you deride are essential for high availability systems (such as SAS/SATA hot swapping).
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