Re: ELN Reasons (was Re: Proposal: Revise FESCo voting policy)

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On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 8:04 AM Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 6:56 AM Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I have several reasons against ELN, which I have already stated for past
> > versions of your proposal (Should I really have repeated those at every
> > single revised version that you came up with to bypass the repeated
> > rejection?):
> > * Having a buildroot that drops support for some subarchitectures is a step
> >   towards dropping those subarchitectures for everyone, which is exactly
> >   what we do not want. There is absolutely no reason to test dropping
> >   subarchitectures anywhere if we are not going to deploy it ever.
>
> FWIW, we do not currently have that in place (and may never). That
> said, I disagree with your ex post facto statement that we would never
> drop any subarchitectures. We certainly wouldn't drop them without
> sufficient information to justify it, which is why we would need a
> place to learn that information.
>
> That said, the AVX2 proposal is currently on hold and is (IMHO)
> unlikely to be implemented for RHEL 9.
>
> > * Having a buildroot called "EL Next" means that Fedora gets in the business
> >   of composing the development version of RHEL in addition to the
> >   development version of Fedora. I do not see how this is the job of Fedora
> >   and Fedora maintainers. RHEL should be developed on RHEL infrastructure,
> >   by RHEL maintainers only.
>
> That sounds like the exact opposite of open source, to me. The entire
> point of this exercise is to do *less* work out of the public eye. The
> set of people who would be doing this work behind the firewall are now
> going to be instructed to work in Rawhide (and, by extension, ELN) to
> prepare for future versions of RHEL. This will also give the community
> at large more opportunity to influence the eventual RHEL 9 (and
> onwards) content and design.
>
> So, new issues that are discovered while building for a RHEL prototype
> will be far more visible and can be addressed earlier, either by the
> community maintainer or the RHEL maintainer working in the Fedora
> environment.
>

I want to preface this first with the statement that I think having
ELN is a good thing in general. I would actually really like to see
RHEL development just be an aspect of Fedora, and I would *love* for
other Fedora downstreams to do the same within Fedora. Excluding
commercial downstream users of Fedora (which isn't just Red Hat!) is a
great way to completely destroy our community. I'd love to see Amazon
Linux development in Fedora, for example. And non-commercial
side-stream/down-stream consumers and contributors like Mageia,
OpenMandriva, etc. I would love to see folks from SUSE involved in
Fedora too, just as I would love to see Fedorans involved in openSUSE.
I want all of us in the RPM Linux distribution ecosystem working together
more to solve problems better!

But I think a huge part of the reaction about ELN comes back to this
perception by folks that Fedora is not useful on its own and only
exists as an alpha/beta test bed for RHEL. In recent years, it has
increasingly appeared like this was true (wrt modularity, ARK, and
recent CPE stuff). It's *generally* not, but there are definitely some
folks I've met within Red Hat who *do* consider it that way, even
though it's absolutely wrong. I've even heard grumbles from folks who
wished it Fedora worked like CentOS (which is only a user community
and not a developer+user community).

And it doesn't help that Fedora is technically the outlier among Red
Hat projects: no other Red Hat project has a governance model like
Fedora's. No other Red Hat project has formal structures to allow the
community to have as strong of a voice as it does. A lot of Red Hat
projects are in fact set up the *opposite* way: there is no way for
the community to have a strong influence without getting a Red Hat
employee to be on their side. It's quite interesting, because if you
look at projects like Kubernetes that are very successful, they are
structured very similarly to how Fedora is. Many of the concepts and
governance structures are extremely similar to how the Fedora Project
works. The difference between Fedora and Kubernetes is that Fedora
doesn't have people paid to advocate for the community and encourage
folks to participate in it.

When *I* look at Fedora, I see something special: a community with
massively unrealized potential. We're a huge passionate group of folks
that try to work diligently and amicably with the communities that
make the projects that the Fedora Linux distribution ships. We are
also often the drivers of innovation. In many cases, this is obvious
(UsrMerge, systemd, PipeWire, Wayland, EarlyOOM, etc.). In some cases,
it's not (Koji, fedmsg, HyperKitty, Pagure, Dist-Git, Ansible,
AppStream, RPM-OSTree, etc.). And a great deal of this is driven by
people in the community who *aren't* from Red Hat!

But a lot of people don't see it this way, and many of us bristle when
they bring up the RHEL point. Just look at Phoronix, Reddit, or any
other place, and you'll see the comments about people being "free
labor" or "free QA" for Red Hat. This is an unfair characterization
that speaks to a deep misunderstanding of how this relationship is
supposed to work. And it goes both ways: both Fedorans and Red Hatters
misunderstand this and mischaracterize it in ways that are
counterproductive.

So I guess, in the end, what I want to see is RHEL becoming more like
Fedora: more participatory and better able to respond to the needs of
the community as well as Red Hat's customers. To me, I think ELN, when
done right, can do just that.




--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!
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