Goodbye, Fedora

[Rahul Sundaram]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> I can tell you the library in question was libcom_err, and I think I
> deleted it when removing e2fsprogs-libs to get around a file conflict.
> But with rpm not working I couldn't reinstall the library.  Boot failed,
> ssh/sshd failed -- I had to kluge with netcat and tar just to back up
> my files.  It was horrible.  

Well, deleting a critical library in a random fashion to avoid conflicts 
isnt exactly a bright idea.

> Alas, I no longer have the logs, as I lost them during installation.
> I don't recall what the file was, but the conflict was completely
> avoidable and would never have occurred if the repo and RPMs had been
> in a sane state.

Perhaps but a proper bug report on the conflict and RFE's on whatever 
suggestions you had on improving it would have been better. We cant 
verify or deny your problem now.

> I was thinking of the the endless internal wrangling over what to do
> about the core/extras split, and the years the project has spent
> failing to engage with third-party developers and repo maintainers.

I dont think we had any internal wrangling about that. Mostly it was 
clear we had to bring them together as much as possible and the idea 
that we are going to combine them in some way has been floating for a 
while. The merge is very disruptive but it is a very significant step 
forward. Possibly the best step we have every taken since the project 
launch.

Third party repo maintainers like Mathias and Axel continue to be 
heavily involved in Fedora now. I would say we did engage them.

> That IRC-session parody of Fedora politics somebody wrote back around
> 2002 remains as painfully on-point today as it was then.

Except it appears that the person who wrote it doesnt now agree with you 
on that.

  > I was doing what I told Jesse Keating I'd do -- using that submission
> as a probe of the process, and planning to write up a narrative of the
> difficulties and some recommendations once it was done.  (I'll note
> that I thought the reviewer did a good job of critique, so the early
> indications were somewhat positive.)

I dont see how you could continue claiming that it is poorly documented 
if you hadnt gone through the process completely. Please either specify 
the problem or drop your claim. Spending a lot of time on something only 
to get vague criticism repeatedly is very frustrating.

>>> * Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.
>> Unless this is just about proprietary codecs, Red Hat continues to do a 
>> lot of work on the desktop
> 
> To no visible result.  You had the developers, the first-mover
> advantage, and the corporate backing; you lacked the vision and the
> will to follow through.  Ubuntu shows what could have been done -- but
> if you guys had executed correctly, Ubuntu's market- and mindshare
> would be at best statistical noise (if it existed at all).

I wouldnt describe the work on fundamental pieces of desktop such as 
HAL, DBus, Network Manager, AIGLX and so on as having no visible result.


>> We spend a lot of time even recently on FUDCon Boston 2007 discussing 
>> this. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureCodecBuddy
> 
> Again, to no visible result.  And with zealots screaming their heads off
> against it whenever the topic came up on fedora-devel.  I wound up
> expecting that any Fedora 'solution' would be half-hearted and ineffective
> and involve far too much sneering at users' actual needs and too little
> effort spent on actually meeting them.  

You are just too early to see any results of this work. Judging the list 
discussion to be reflective on the software development assumes that the 
  list discussions is actually from the developers.

> The wiki page does nothing to disabuse me of this expectation by using
> terms like "brainwashing".  The contempt for mere users this exhibits is
> very revealing, and is a significant part of the reason I've decamped.

You just lose your sense of humor there.

Rahul