Dne 7.5.2010 16:56, Przemek Klosowski napsal(a): > Here's the rub, though: Kevin argues for aggressive development and > empowering the package maintainers to push out changes, even if it > resulted in temporary regressions. Ralf, on the other hand, reminds us > about the need for quality control, process and stability. They can't > both be right---but the entire project is better off for them voicing > their opinions. Well, I would argue that both can be right (although I believe Ralf would strongly disagree with me on this point). The point in Kevin's triades which I am afraid was utterly rejected (or ignored) is that the most important relationship in whole Fedora land is the relationship between package maintainer and users of the package she maintains. When I came to Fedora from the Debian-world (around FC6 release) I was absolutely in awe how better experience was maintaining packages in Fedora than in Debian. It seemed like the combination of best of being completely independent and maintaining your own repository (what would be now called PPA; I haven't heard the term then yet) and having support and community of fellow maintainers all in one package. It was refreshing to see how problems were just solved on the spot without need to apply for permission and a lot of bureaucracy. The result was incredibly rapid development (I remember I was using as an advertisement slogan “Fedora? Next release of your distribution today!”). This vision in my opinion requires freedom for packagers of individual packages to have quite wide allowance in setting their own policies concerning updates and bug fixing. If Kevin prefers to have packages on all distros synchronized and (maybe, I don't know, I don't use KDE) broken much more often than Gnome-folks, it is in my opinion mostly between KDE team and KDE users. Also, if they don't think they can manage much more than pushing all non-packaging bugs upstream, I am not the one who would preach to them they should do better (especially without providing manpower to do so). OTOH, if Ralph doesn't won't to push almost any bug upstream and he wants to make sure that all Fedora bugs are fixed asap, great for his users, they will certainly love him, but I am not sure it should be fixed as a rule for everybody. This kind of "shared PPA" vision doesn't exclude some kind of stricter requirements on critical-path packages ... if glibc or kernel is broken, than basically everybody is affected and these components should be fixed fast to allow others to work. But I would think that this critical path should be really short ... glibc, kernel, udev & co. and it should end somewhere at xorg-x11-* packages, but not much more. Certainly the critical packages shouldn't cover by far “all what normal user needs for his work” (including OpenOffice.org and Firefox), “whatever is on LiveCD”, or “in the end everything” (all three ideas I have actually heard). Of course, this kind of development process doesn’t produce distro stable enough I could put it on my company’s server (or my mom’s notebook), but it could be an ideal distro for developers or contributors of any kind (with reference to http://smoogespace.blogspot.com/2010/05/at-least-they-had-burning-cloud-to.html by contributor I mean anybody who provides any bits to the distro ... packagers, artists, translators, tech writers, QA folks, yes, even admins; I would say that somebody just handing the DVD to a friend is doing good job in promoting the distro, but he isn't contributor in my meaning of the word). It seems to me that the current fashion is going sharply against this vision of "shared PPA". There is more and more policies, permissions, preliminary testing, etc. Suddenly packaging for Fedora is less and less fun and more and more chore, which I don't want to dwell in. I have left most of packaging last year (for various personal and non-personal reasons) but I don't feel much urge to return to packaging anymore. Or in other words, if I need some package, I can package it myself, but I tend to keep all packages in my personal repository, and not bother with all permissions, reviews, guildelines, policies (which is not to say that there are no guidelines which could be helpful). I don't need that much bandwidth and storage for my personal needs any (which is the key resource current establishment controls). I wonder how many packagers (or former packagers) feels the same. More and more I was writing this email, more and more I tend to agree with somebody today, who wrote that they key problem of the Fedora community is unclear vision about its purpose. I agree completely. I believe, that in the root of many of our problems lies in our unwillingness to say that we are not end-user-oriented distribution, but the contributors-oriented one. There are many who pretends that it is possible to be both CentOS (or Ubuntu) and Fedora-as-we-knew-it at the same time, at that additional bureaucracy has no costs for development. I think it does, and that the current trend doesn't lead to excellency in our core mission. We may end up being the second (or even first) Ubuntu in terms of number of users. But I really don't think the size matters in the question of how much value we bring to the whole Linux community at all. By deserting the position of developer-oriented distro I think whole Linux community looses one excellent part, and in the end we may be just another end-users oriented Ubuntu (maybe slightly better) ... who cares? Best, Matěj -- Less is more or less more. -- Y_Plentyn on #LinuxGER (from fortunes -- I cannot resist :-) -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
