Hans de Goede wrote:
Why should those that care tell the user how to work around a problem being created by people who appereantly don't care? And here we have the real problem, the real problem is not this update this is just an example the real problem is many Fedora developers seem to be so arrogant that they don't care about their endusers. Thank you I guess that is what frustates me the not caring, now can we please start discussing that which IMHO is the real issue and stop discussing the example.
FWIW and even though it's probably not the best example in the world. Large proprietary corporations sometimes update stuff even though it means that a few thousand+ users will end up with a broken system. Our friends in Redmond are but one example. And those guys aren't even that biased towards technical improvement vs user friendliness.
The point is that Fedora has a dedicated mission to provide a completely free OS. Because of this and a number of other things, we cannot wait for binary-only, non-free driver vendors to catch up all the time. This has been said several times before. If we actually chose to wait for Nvidia/ATI (as an example), what other stuff do we need to wait for next? Perhaps a security problem in the kernel breaks certain binary-only network drivers? perhaps a bug release of glibc has the possibility of causing instabilities in a proprietary database engine? It's just not possible to predict, prevent and/or regard all of the problems that MAY arise because of unsupported stuff - That's why it's unsupported in the first place. And there are certainly no reason why such unsupported components should prolong the adaption of improved components for the rest of the userbase.
I'm firmly of the belief that Fedora should NOT wait for anything like this. Problems like these are best regarded by the 3rd party repos like livna or atrpms. However, I can understand the unfortunate problem for users who depend on the binary drivers too. My thought is that if an update causing problems for a non-free, binary-only driver is not acceptable (it's acceptable for me and the proprietary drivers I have to deal with on certain Fedora machines), then they should probably choose a different platform for those systems (I have lots of RHEL systems too because of support issues with proprietary stuff too). There are several free and non-free projects that will be more ABI stable than Fedora (And there are free RHEL-like distros to choose from as well). But a lot of us LIKE this characteristic about Fedora. Actually all the catering to binary and non-free stuff are some of the things that keep me away from other distros for certain types of machines. I suspect a few other Fedora users feel the same way about this.
Again - It has absolutely nothing to do with deliberately breaking stuff for anyone. I don't think most of the replies in this discussion has been mean or arrogant. But some updates will benefit a lot of users who have NOT chosen to rely on a binary-only driver that the Fedora community or any other open community have no possible way to support and so this is the way it essentially has to be.
If anything in the above sounds arrogant in any way, it's unintended. /Thomas -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
