On Fri, 11 Oct 2019 at 14:29, Chris Murphy <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > My main gripe is the current situation where users are thrown under the > > bus and then we give them a business card and say: read these > > instruction to figure out how to save yourself. > > I think this is unacceptable. > > Ordinary every day user or do you mean packagers being thrown under > the bus. And really then, is there a difference because neither the > mortal user or immortal packager should be thrown under the bus, when > we get right down to it. That's certainly not a design tolerance. Too > much trust in dnf has been built up for that to happen. It's natural > and necessary any possibility of that be resisted. > > And I don't actually know any of the parameters under discussion. I > don't even understand RPM let alone modularity. Every time I approach > packaging I find too many barriers to entry, or at least something > else that seems more interesting. I'm quite content with dnf and > packagers doing the work. Is there a shrinking packager problem? > There has been a shrinking packager problem for years due to multiple problems 1. A lot of packagers were doing this as volunteer time, and that is a limited resource. You get sick, you get tired, you have a work deadline, etc and then you find yourself 2-3 releases behind and not feeling like looking at 200 bugzilla's. 2. A lot of packages needed more development work than a packager could pursue. If I packaged up xtank because i loved the game, and was able to fix a couple of things.. that is ok. However when it turns out that it needs a lot of forward port work because Fedora moved to X11R20 and the maintainers want to stick to Xorg for a bit longer.. you just let the bugzilla's pile up hoping it will sort itself. 3. For years there was a cross distro 'arms' race of 'our distro needs as many packages as possible or no one will use it'. So you ended up with some set of packages being pulled in which people were 'sort' of interested in versus invested in. 4. Packaging is like making cheese, there are 2000 different ways to do so and it is hard to know which ones are good. Trying to come up with consensus at times or getting people to follow the consensus ends up with tyres burning in the streets. 5. Getting reviews takes time and energy from reviewers. When you have 100 packages you absorbed from 4 different packagers.. you have little time to look at someone else's and mentor them. So instead you have a backlog of package reviews and probably people who are no longer interested tied to it. 6. Package upstreams are a lot faster and change greatly. There are a lot of software which will completely add a dozen new dependencies and the packager has to rip out the embedded versions or find the versions which work. Of course those versions rarely work with everything else and you end up with conflicts between things. That is tiring and people age out. As packagers left for some reason or another, other packagers would find that meant something they needed was going away and would take that package. And like a death of a thousand papercuts, that meant that those packagers also started to find their time eaten up so they might have less time to mentor others. Then some of those people burned out and you ended up with even more 'well I will take your 100 packages' added onto people. Just to be clear, this isn't a problem with only Fedora. Debian, OpenSuSE, etc are all facing the same problems as volunteers interested in working on distributions are not a 'growing' percentage. It also doesn't mean that it is the end of the world. It does mean we have to be more clear about our limits and stick to them. Trying to package up a lot (or all ) of software does not make sense for multiple reasons. However the primary one is that most software was never written to be integrated into an Operating System. It was written as a universe of its own, and the developers dont' see it as their job or vision to be tied to an OS. We can force all kind of things to try to make it but each one takes time and energy from people who are volunteering that effort and could be doing something else. > -- > Chris Murphy > _______________________________________________ > devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ > List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines > List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- Stephen J Smoogen. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
