Jon Masters píše v Po 30. 08. 2010 v 16:13 -0400: > On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 12:36 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: > > > We had a distro that was pretty general purpose, worked for servers > > and desktops and even laptops. We had a predictable schedule. > > It's called Laissez-faire meets reality. Right now we have a lot of > "free market" philosophy in Fedora that basically says if everything is > left alone then good things will magically happen, sum is greater than > the parts, yada yada yada. Too many labels, too little predictive value... Let's talk specifically about incentives instead. If interested Linux developers meet to create a distribution because they want to, you'll inevitably get an updates firehose: A typical developer wants the dependencies of the software they are working on to be _very_ up to date - probably not the upstream development version, but the upstream maintenance version with _all_ current bug fixes. Waiting 6 months for a bug fix does not make sense - at that point the developer would be tempted to build the new version locally. So, web developers want latest httpd/PHP/Rails/MySQL; GNOME developers want latest gtk/libgnome*; and so on. Similarly, everyone who cares about the tools they use daily (which developers tend to), wants the best versions of these tools, as soon as it is practical. So, newest version of emacs/vim/kdevelop/... [Some people develop low-level software against glibc, and haven't changed their development environment for years; for them the flow of updates really is not that interesting, and it seems superfluous.] Saying "use rawhide" is not helpful, because rawhide is very often broken. A "stable" release that breaks a specific component for a few days is acceptable - if this is not a component one uses for development, it doesn't matter; if this is such a component, one knows about it well enough to be able to revert an update or to contribute a fix. When a large number of Fedora contributions are not paid to do so, they naturally write a distribution _for themselves_. Why would they not? That means that updates will be frequent; few maintainers would push updates they consider too risky, but some risk is acceptable. The "updates firehose" for components one does not much care about is a minor risk, compared to the "commit firehose" for a mid-size program on which one collaborates with two or more other people. The result is a distribution on which it is reasonably easy to develop current software, and a distribution on which one might not update critical system updates on the night before giving a presentation on a conference (FWIW, I can't recall a really bad updates experience). That doesn't seem to be a bad tradeoff - for a developer. Now, if we Fedora should be a distribution that developers enjoy using, there will be an updates firehose - and most developers won't mind too much. If Fedora should be a distribution that developers can install on their grandparents' computers, developers won't enjoy working on the distribution so much - both because this requires bureaucracy, and because the result is not as interesting a distribution - and either the quality and size of the distribution will suffer, or there will have to be another motivation for many people to participate. So, does Fedora want to be a place where interested Linux developers meet to create a distribution they enjoy, or a project where people who are for some reason compelled to create a distribution for others collaborate on it? What Fedora advertised is "..., Features, First" - that's a developer's distro; Fedora was never "M million happy users, growing X% annually". Mirek -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
