On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 00:36 +0100, Naheem Zaffar wrote: > But that is not always the case though - Even Ubuntu with its > conservative updates policy has suffered by the addition of new bugs > in them, and the users also suffer for existing bugs which are not > fixed by bugfix updates. Sure. I don't claim Ubuntu to be the best implementation of anything much. ;) > The "fedora way" may seem more cavalier from the outset and also has a > greater chance to introduce instability, however it can also result in > a *more stable* distribution over its life time. Stable is a word that's often misused. In this case, the important sense of stable is "does the same stuff on Tuesday as it did on Monday" - even if the stuff it did on Monday was dumb. If you make it smarter on Tuesday, you've still changed it's behaviour, and the person or script who was expecting the behaviour from Monday is stuffed. > (as for bikeshedding being pointless, I remember an individual coming > on here and bikeshedding about how the GUI software manager should > work. I even ignored the discussion as I thought the concept of it > preposterous. Move forward a couple of years and frontend package > management (in Fedora atleast - I do not use other distributions but I > assume they have not drunk the packagekit coolaide as deeply) has been > improved far beyond the capabilities I imagined it would ever go. What > is important is to try to get the complainers to scratch their own > itch and if the itch affects enough people, it will be sufficiently > scratched.) In this case it's not really an 'itch' to be scratched, it's a fundamental question of Fedora's identity, which no one person can define or change on his or her own. If I could unilaterally declare "Fedora is a project to create a great stable operating system for ordinary people!" or "Fedora is a sandbox for the development of cool new software by the technologically knowledgeable!", great, I would. But I can't. I'm just noticing that there's a fundamental identity crisis between those two poles which affects rather a lot of issues in Fedora, and we all need to get to grips with it to be able to have a focused and coherent response to those issues. I suspect the majority would go for option B, and that's probably the most sensible place for Fedora to be. But we need clarity on that. In some ways we do a good job of this - I think, for instance, http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview is pretty solid, and doesn't just say "if you're human, use Fedora!". But, for instance, quite a lot of Fedora people like to talk about the 'ten million users' number, which I don't think is very helpful if we're not about an operating system for ordinary users; it'd be better to talk about some metric for the useful *results* that come out of the Fedora community. And there are frequently threads in which people explicitly or implicitly claim that we should worry about the needs of 'ordinary users' or some such catchphrase. So it's not clear. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
