On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 10:31 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: > > See what I mean? No choice is a choice. > > > In writing my reply, I figured out where the disconnect is between what > you're seeing and what I'm seeing. You're looking at this from the > user's point of view. Yes, you could say I have a nasty habit of doing that. ;) Actually I try and look at things from many points of view, but the user's point of view is a rather important one. We're _all_ users, even those of us who are also maintainers. Each maintainer only maintains a little bit of the distro. With regard to all the other packages we don't maintain, we're users. Imagine two staff members in a store discussing an issue, then one turning to the other and saying "ohhh, I get it. You're thinking about the CUSTOMER'S point of view!" :D > In that case, a hands off policy does make it > more likely that the user will have an adventurous experience rather > than a conservative experience even if one segment of the maintainer > community (the desktop team) is doing its best to play a conservative role. > > I think we'd be happy to admit to the end users that that's the kind of > distro we are and that CentOS/RHEL may be a better venue for the > machines that they want to take a hands-off, everything works today and > so everything will work tomorrow and the next day approach. We > currently tell people to run CentOS or RHEL for the machines in that use > case because of the 13 month EOL period anyway. Well, I'd be happy if we did that, yes. I guess the best thing would be to take some kind of proposal to the appropriate committee that we just write up a document, for the wiki or fedoraproject.org or wherever's appropriate, to make it clear that we don't have a conservative update policy, and that we don't expect users to be able to treat Fedora like a CentOS/RHEL/Debian stable/whatever-style operating system, from an update point of view. > The viewpoint that you also have to see, though, is the packager > viewpoint. From within we don't all agree on whether we should have a > conservative or an adventurous update policy. As the specifics of > whether to update KDE and whether to update GNOME demonstrate, different > sets of maintainers want the opposite strategies. Mandating that > maintainers will either follow the conservative or the adventurous or > follow both the conservative and the adventurous update path may satisfy > the most users but leaves the maintainers disgruntled. Yes, I agree, it wasn't my intent to suggest that. Even in the combined case, maintainers always have the choice to not bother to ship adventurous updates, and even if we specify that we don't guarantee conservative updates, maintainers who don't want to do adventurous updates aren't compelled to. I just want to be clear about how the big picture looks to users in each of these cases, and try for consistent messaging on whichever path we end up on, so users know what they can expect from Fedora. > I'm going to note, though, that this still doesn't address the original > poster's question or thorsten's followup -- some areas of our > distribution will still follow a conservative update policy as long as > we give individual maintainers the leeway to use their best judgement. Yes, you're right there. -- 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
