Reasons for hall monitoring

[Matěj Cepl]

Dne 8.5.2010 03:39, Stephen John Smoogen napsal(a):
> It is a blessing and it is a curse. Why do more developers show up at
> conferences these days running Ubuntu or Debian systems.. many who
> used to run Fedora or RHL? My very non-scientific survey has been that
> it isn't that Ubuntu is cooler, etc.. but it is just much more stable.

a) there is a reason, why I have mentioned that bigger doesn't have to 
be better ... it is quite obvious to me that user-oriented distro would 
be more popular than developer-oriented one.
b) do you have real testimonies of scores of developers Fedora 
*switching to* Ubuntu? I would love to hear them. I don't care that much 
about people using Ubuntu, because they always used Ubuntu (or Debian), 
but people who actually switched from Fedora (perhaps even RHEL, but 
that's slightly different ... default selection of packages is quite 
limited in RHEL, so I can imagine that somebody who doesn't like to have 
three or four repositories switched on, may be lured by the endless 
package offering in Debian world).

> but on the other hand they don't have to
> worry that the 3 KDE apps they use didn't completely change over a
> weekend (or vice versa the 2 gnome apps they depend on for something
> didn't break because ibus got added as a dependency and didn't work
> for some reason.)

Even if it is so (I don't like what feels like picking on KDE all the 
time), just hypothetically, let's say that KDE is too radical in its 
updates and it is broken quite often. Then in my vision of the world it 
means that KDE packages are broken, I don't care that much about Fedora 
as whole. Yes, it is unfortunately more probable that people switch 
distros than they switch desktop environments, but C'est la vie I guess.

> The vision works as long as the set of packages and packagers is
> small. It is very much the "Tragedy of the Commons" where at a certain
> point I don't have a strong enough social link to think or worry about
> what effect my package might have on something 30 packages away from
> me. The fact that its broken and 4 users left doesn't really affect me
> unless it turns out that it is Linus and he says something like "Sorry
> about missing 2.6.36-rc1.. but for some reason Xmonkey. started
> writing 0's to all my files last night and my backups too... Didn't
> know I even had it installed.." Sure it got pulled in because it gives
> libslapmonkey and now vim pulls it in so you can have an animated
> monkey if you type :monkeybrainz [or some such thing.] But in cases
> where it isn't Linus people just don't know.

You may be right, I don't have good arguments here, but I would just 
point out that your example is about kernel ... which quite certainly 
should be on the critical path. How many such disasters could be caused 
by a desktop environment being broken? Isn't that a problem between DE 
packager and her users (who might be other packagers as well)? I 
remember such disasters being caused by kernel, glibc, gcc, openssl, 
pam, libz and similar ... which should be certainly on the critical path.

Matěj

-- 
This message has been composed of recycled electrons. None of
these electrons has been harmed or injured in the creation and
transmission of this message but they have been shamelessly
exploited for this use.