Worthless updates

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 03/03/2010 10:17 AM, Alexander Kurtakov wrote:
>> On Wednesday 03 March 2010, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> On 03/03/2010 09:03 AM, Jon Masters wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2010-03-02 at 21:07 -0500, Seth Vidal wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 2 Mar 2010, Jesse Keating wrote:
>>>>> Ok... removing deprecated uses is a questionable at best update, but
>>>>> here is the kicker.  The perl in F11 is perl-5.10.0-82.fc11.  So these
>>>>> functions aren't actually deprecated in F11.  So... why is this update
>>>>> going out?  What possible benefit does the user get from this?  Does
>>>>> anybody see this as a reasonable update to publish on F11?
>>>
>>> My own personal opinion is that stable updates should only fix serious
>>> issues, or security problems. Fedora has such a short lifetime as it is,
>>> I really can't see the value in pushing features to F11 when it will die
>>> soon. I think it's far better to leave the churn in rawhide.
>>
>> Let F11 rott because it's EOL soon?
>>
>> Pardon, but you can't be serious about this.
>>
>> At least I am trying to provide all released Fedoras with same amount of
>> attention.
>>
>> Anybody still wonders about Fedora's poor shape and it's reputation?
>
> Hmm, I would not say that Fedora is in poor shape :).

Well, I can not avoid to say so. ... this doesn't necessarily mean other 
distros are much better.

May-be I am too close to Fedora, may-be I am too heavily using it,
and therefore am aware about issues "occasional users" won't notice ... 
I don't know.

Just some issues I have been experiencing with Fedora 12 in recent past:

- Audio stops working twice a day (presumable culprit: Pulseaudio).
- PackageKit's "notification icons" are nonfunctional.
- 2 identical machines are issuing kernel oops seemingly due to a kernel 
bug.
- When unplugging the power cord from my netbook, my netbook shuts down 
with "battery critically low (96% full) shutting down"
- ABRT ... an master piece of an immature piece of SW which should not 
have been added to the distro.
...

> When we speak about
> reputation believe me it's way worse if an update breaks smth on my sister's
> computer than me having to fix smth during installation and verifying it works
> before giving her the computer.
This perl-module update won't affect your sister - She won't even notice 
it - But she'll very likely notice the breakage yesterday's KDE update 
has caused and she'll likely be confused by this "freaking notification 
box in the upper right corner telling her to report something" ...

> And break does not only mean what we accept as
> a break, e.g.  a simple fonts hinting change will be considered a break if
> this causes some of her documents to look in a different way. We are not
> speaking for tech savy users only and change for this type of users means you
> have to take care of "This update broke my homework formatting" or "Where is
> that blue icon for usb devices now?" and etc.
Where has that "CD icon" popped up now and on which of the virtual 
displays is this "freaking spatical desktop, popup window now" are 
questions I am fighting with, daily.

Ralf