/usrmove?

[Ondrej Vasik]

On Fri, 2012-02-10 at 05:45 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 02/09/2012 11:06 PM, Jared K. Smith wrote:
> >> - management, whom seems to be driven by a "must have at any price, no point
> >> of return ever" policy.
> >
> > I'm not sure who you're referring to as "management" here
> Everybody involved to drawing strategic and tactical decisions related 
> to the Fedora distribution.
> 
> My point is, I feel there is a lack of "monitoring", "reporting", and a 
> sense of "responsibility" of the different bodies involved and of people 
> who are able to draw "unpleasant decisions".
> 
> To draw an arbitrary example from recent past: Ask yourself - What was 
> the shape of systemd in F15/F16? Has the situation been fixed in F17?
> 
> Wrt. F17: usrmove - Independently from the fact that I consider it to be 
> an "idotic foolishness", ask yourself if it is a shape to be part of 
> F17? IMO, it's foreseeable it will not be ready, because there are too 
> many unknows attached to it. I now would expect those people having been 
> involved to stand up, show responsibility and revisit their decisions - 
> This obiviously doesn't happen.

One additional item to this topic.
I'm the Fedora filesystem package maintainer (and because it has it's
upstream on the fedorahosted, you can say upstream...) and I was aware
of the "usrmove" feature only from the discussions and feature pages. 
For quite a long time I waited for an email from Harald - with some
"please include the changes into upstream git". The only mail I received
from him was the mail on 24th of January - saying - do not build the
package. Nothing more... Strange - when the first thing for Fedora
maintainers should be "upstream first" and imho violation of Proven
packager rules in some cases . For me it was kind of misusing proven
packager - as e.g. in coreutils package he did following change:

+%check
+# FIXME: check failed!!
+# make check
(part of
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/scm-commits/2012-January/725967.html ,
quite easy to miss when reading the commit mail)

without even informing me about that! I don't see disabling testsuite at
buildtime as the necessary minimal change. Not saying anything that with
the /bin/ provides the spec file looks really like a mess now.

Given the fact that there is NO ultimate gain from the usrmove feature
(ok, I understand all the arguments for the usrmove, but I don't see
them that bright at the moment as Harald and fastboot guys - e.g. the
compatibility of distro locations is not only in the locations of
binaries and we have much more differences in Fedora)

I really don't know why the REAL ACTIONS on this feature were started
that late in F17 release cycle - several months after branching. Only 3
weeks after the start of usrmove git commits you now have even F18 git
branch and F18 would have been MUCH better for it.
In addition, for mock builds of F17+ packages with usrmove support on
RHEL-6 systems you now need UNSUPPORTED rpm from Harald pages
( http://people.redhat.com/harald/downloads/rpm/4.8.0-19.el6.0.usrmove.1/ ).

I'm sure that reverting the changes at the moment would mean much more
confusion and that there is the only option now - finish it.
But I hope that FESCO will learn from this "feature" and will set the
"deadlines" for distro-wide features with higher impact sooner - so
there will be enough time to postpone them to Fedora X+1 in the case of
immaturity. I think there is a difference between usrmove and e.g.
GIMP2.8 feature (no offence to Gimp).


Greetings,
         Ondrej Vasik