On Thu, 05 Aug 2004 14:52:17 -0400, Toshio <toshio@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I agree that Core shouldn't be a rolling release, but I think Extras is > currently very much a Rolling Release. And it's best if it stays that > way. I think you are wrong. I think having synced time releases of Extras as a priority makes a lot of issues go away. Issues that i think are vastly more important than your desire as an end-user to get the lastest one or two applications without having to flush your whole OS. I'd rather work towards making it less painful to do whole Fedora Core upgrades then to build a Fedora development process that encourages people to focus attention to older Core releases. Having synced Extras and Core releases.. as a priority allows for a MUCH easier generation of other 'collections' besides Core. Read Tiemann's strawman proposal. I very interested in making sure the development process of Fedora makes it easy for people to make and continue to maintain a Fedora livecd or a Rule based mediaset or other installable 'collections' by picking and choosing among Fedora Extras and Fedora Core packages to bundle together as a new installable collection. If Extras is not synced against Core releases, any sort of community maintained 'collection' is going to be burdened to deal with the different timesscales associated with Core and Extras package development. So that we can FINALLY get past these crappy 'whats in Core' debates and just let Core be an arbitrary set of packages with NO inherent distinction in the development process. Every package treated equally in development process itself, then distilled into collections..one collection being named Core. The other issue synced Extras to Core will greatly help with is doing installs and upgrades painlessly from computers without broadband, from media sets. This is a serious issue for a lot of people, and having point release media sets of Core+Extras as a priority that people can use with anaconda is an absolute necessity if we want to actually consider Fedora Extras as part of Fedora and not just another 3rd party repository. I don't want Fedora Extras to be just like it is now...i want it to be INTEGRATED into the development process. I want to see FC5 and FE5 come out on media sets, and have anaconda understand how to deal with FE5 media when installing FC5 from media. I want to see FC5.1 and FE5.1 update media sets 3 months later which include supplimental updates and new packages as well via bittorrent. I want to get to the point where we can seriously talk about moving things out of Core into Extras or out of Extras into Core..without upgrade path problems. This is only going to happen if we make development Extras targert Core development as a PRIORITY. I want to get to the point where Red Hat feels comfortable enough to allow some of the RHEL cruft to drift over to Extras to make room for community contributed things that are less RHEL relevant into Core. I don't see that happening if Extras is continued to be treated with its own timetables and development paths. The keyword here is.. PRIORITY. If some Extras maintainers want to keep rolling packages every day for FC releases to keep close to upstream... great... more power to those individuals, if they have they time to continue to roll updates great. BUT there is a HUGE difference between giving invidivuals the space to do that...and demanding ALL the packagers, community or red hat, to deal with that sort of churn. The development tree is where integration issues between Core packages are primarily worked out... i see no reason why integration issues between Extras and Core package should NOT be worked out in the same way. An integrated Extras needs to be proactively developed and get interaction problems solved with Core developers while Core developers are focused on the development tree. We are talking about corner cases here, where there is some sort of build problem associated with a bug or packaging error in an already released FC release that would prevent the successful building of suppliment FE packages for released Cores. I don't want to drag to focus of development backwards as a matter of policy. If maintainers can work the issues out for themselves and every packager invovled with the maintaince issues can come to agreement..great. If not, no biggie, work out the integration issues in the development and make sure the next FC-N/FC-N package sets have it all ironed out. >As a spare time packager, I can't be constantly updating my system > so I can release a package at the same time as a new Core is released. If the Fedora infrastructure that is put in place for community to use can't address your concern about continually updating your own system, then we are doomed regardless. > As a user, I want to find a package that's as close to upstream at the > time I'm looking, not one that was released when the distro came out. Instant gratification seems to be a constant demand... and an odd one. If you want as close to upstream as possible really... update from the development tree for ALL the packages from the kernel right on up the stack. If its okay to eat close to upstream Extras, you should be okay eating close to upstream Core as well. The distinction between what is in Core and what is in Extras needs to be come less distinct from a development process point of view or we aren't going to make any progress on really expanding the potential of Fedora in new directions. > FC1 might be near EOL, but it's still widely used. With such quick > EOL'ing, there will always be a large number of systems that are EOL but > still in use. I can't upgrade my wife's machine until October, for > instance, because she has a class that's wrapping up and I don't want to > disrupt it's stability until it's over. I don't think EOL of Core is > such a good measure of whether to continue trying to build Extras > packages for it. as a PRIORITY is what i said... if YOU as an invidual packager want to build for FC1 great, after you have the package synced with Core development. But if your new builds dont work becuase of a problem with a dependancy in Core or in Extras, i don't think its appropriate to demand that the Core or Extras packager get the necessary fix out the door. Their personal priorities might be different than yours and I don't think its necessarily appropriate to have them make your interests their priority with their efforts. I think its fair to demand everyone to make the development tree the priority for package integration work, and any integration issues in already released Cores is discretionary. Luckily most Core developers can be bribed with either alcohol or a KK doughnut, so i think I have a pretty good shot and talking my way through any corner case discussions to my benefit. > For those developers who have the time and resources to update their > machines to the latest rawhide/test releases, I think you have a good > point about having developers look forwards instead of back. > > For the volunteers who want a stably running system that they can > package foobar for and then submit to Extras because they want to give > back to the community, I don't see this is an option. For the same type > of volunteers who want to do QA of packages when the developers are only > looking towards test/rawhide, this is also an unnecessary raising of the > bar. If contributing packages to Fedora means actually running the development tree...then we are doomed. I would hope that whatever build infrastructure drops from the heavens for contributors to use will not demand that all contributors be running a full fedora development tree...nor any Fedora release at all on the systems where they craft packages. But that being said. I don't think its enough for people to submit a package just because it seems to sort of work on the version of Fedora they are running. I think we must demand more. We need maintainers, not fly-by-night chuck-it-over-the-fence one-off packagers. People who submit packages must commit to long term care and feeding of the package across multiple releases of Core...and that means targetting the development tree as a priority and then worry about existing Core releases. -jef"bah upstream released a new version 2 hours ago...why doesnt fedora have a new package yet...2 whole hours wasted..thats 2 hours of gentoo compiling up in smoke"spaleta
