On 08/30/2010 03:11 PM, Miloslav Trmač wrote: > 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 > I have to say, while I don't agree with this as a direction, this was one of the most thoughtful explanations of the desire for the latest of everything. That said, I think developers as more advanced users really need to be able to make use of something like rawhide to scratch the itch of working on the latest. The people who I support using Fedora are not primarily developers. At this point I'm using Fedora for three main reasons - inertia, I use Centos and Fedora is very similar, and I very much enjoy being part of a community and being able to give back to the community. Perhaps I can get that elsewhere though. -- Orion Poplawski Technical Manager 303-415-9701 x222 NWRA/CoRA Division FAX: 303-415-9702 3380 Mitchell Lane orion@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Boulder, CO 80301 http://www.cora.nwra.com -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
