In many of the recent systemd threads there is an underlying point which I think is on many people's minds but which I haven't seen called out. I think this is a generic issue, so it's a but unfair to single out systemd but it makes a good example. To say it bluntly: Any significant infrastructural change _will_ cost Fedora some users in the short term. The amount lost depends on the specific feature and the effort put in to minimize the bugs and disruption, — usually with enough effort and enough compromises and concessions the number can be made arbitrarily small but it will not be zero. This is especially the case for features which make the system more or less unrecoverable inoperable for 'normal' users when something goes wrong, but it's true more generally as well. And I do think that some loss is acceptable— without tolerating some loss Fedora simply couldn't move forward— no matter how wise or overdue a change is there will be bugs, differences in taste, and disruption. There are some people who are continuing to use Fedora only because learning SomethingElse™ is too much work but when Fedora changes and they'll have to learn either way Fedora's "advantage" vanishes to them. And, yes, the harm won't be equally distributed— it seems to me that Fedora has ignored quite a bit of harm because it didn't primarily fall on what the developer's considered a "typical desktop" (which, as far as I can tell, really means a particularly narrow set of laptop hardware with a particularly narrow set of users and use cases). Why Fedora keeps chasing a market which Ubuntu has undeniably won is beyond me— but nevertheless it's not acceptable to pretend that harms don't exist simply because they don't hit the one use case you care about most, not unless Fedora is willing to say that people running servers, developers, and other power users ought to use some other distribution and that Fedora doesn't care if it loses all of these users. Consider systemd— even if far more work goes into it I think we can admit that it will be very likely that there will be some users with some weird configurations which won't boot up with it. We can blame their weird configurations, hardware, and random packages as much as we like— but at the end of it some of these users are going to leave Fedora because of the change. Some administrators are going to hate the management changes and switch off Fedora as a result. We might all agree that they're lazy or crazy but it is what it is. These losses can be reduced by making systemd emulate the old stuff more accurately (at a cost to systemd's long term purity), by more testing, by providing fallbacks, etc. But some compromises aren't acceptable, no testing is perfect, and many people will never learn about the fallbacks. The same stuff could have been said about kernel modesetting. The sooner people admit this the sooner people can agree on what the acceptable loss level is... Without knowing the acceptable loss level it won't be easy to agree on a release criteria or agree on how much mitigating compromises are required to get there. Denying it or blaming other packages just makes the Fedora community blind to the risks, which is sad since many of them can be reduced and managed. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
