On 09.01.2008 19:45, Hans de Goede wrote: > One of the few reasons why Fedora is my distro of choice is because its usually > cutting edge, and I like to be where the development is happening. +1 > However today I've had an encounter with Fedora which make me wonder if > sometimes we aren't a little too cutting edge. See below. But actually I think we here and there are not even cutting edge enough; we for example left users on Firefox2 for FC6 for about 7 months until we shipped F7 -- that looked totally odd for a distribution that is curring edge in most other areas. Another example: hplip is still on 2.7.7 for F8 right now while upstream is at 2.7.12 in between and supports 22 new printers ( http://hplip.sourceforge.net/release_notes.html ). We don't provide any solutions for users that buy those printers right now besides using rawhide. Thus they have to wait/ask for a proper update or wait until F9 or -- the latter means waiting about 6 months for driver. That's IMHO unacceptable -- especially as printer manufacturers release successor models quite often (it feels to me like a new successor model get released in each printer class about once a year, but I didn't check). > I tried to get an industrial > firewire camera to work with the stock Fedora kernel using the juju stack. Long > [...] > story short, it didn't work. > > Does this mean that Fedora should not have shipped the new stack? No it > doesn't! Getting code out there early into many hands for testing is a good thing. +1 > What IMHO we should have done is build both the new and the oldstack, which is > possible on the kernel side, and modify our patches to userspace to support the > juju stack, so that the userspace libs can work with either one. On top of this > we should then have written a small gui utility for easy switching. That's what I call "Fedora knows better then you". It's afaics not the first time Fedora forces users to use a new technology instead of giving them a choice for a small period. For example there are still users that would like to use the ntfs-module from the kernel, but we don't enable it (making ntfs-3g the default and eabling ntfs in the kernel should solve this problem). Another example: Xgl never made it into the Fedora repos (which in parts is due to packaging problems, but it looks a bit odd). Another example: Zope/Plone was excluded in F7 and later because we jumped to python 2.5 but didn't want to ship a compat-python package (this + Zope/Plone are now in livna for F7 and soon F8 and devel). > Another example of Fedora being to cutting edge is pulseaudio, [...] Not sure about pulseaudio -- works well for me afaics. But yeah, might be a similar issue. Linux is about choice. Just my 2 cent. Cu knurd -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
