Any hope for system-config-services ?

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-07-22 at 08:41 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:

> > And a later post affirms my exact concern (see further down this
> > thread).
> Don't confuse individual opinions with that of a organization.    Red
> Hat has continued steadily increasing the amount of people working in
> Fedora QA and efforts to make Fedora stable like update policy, test
> days and AutoQA don't fit into your hidden agenda theory.    Look,
> what you are saying doesn't make much sense.  If Fedora become very
> unstable,  community will leave and Red Hat has to spend more money
> and time working on stabilizing RHEL.  Besides,  if people don't want
> to pay and want to get the stability of RHEL,  they can always go use 

It's worth remembering that 'stability' is an overloaded term. People
typically use it to mean one of two different things, without qualifying
which one they mean, and thinking about the other.

1: 'unstable' can mean that a product commonly experiences unexpected
failures.

2: 'unstable' can mean that a product undergoes major changes quickly
and constantly.

I think it's almost unarguably clear that Fedora is 'unstable' in sense
#2, and this is often the sense that people are using when they
'explain' to others that Fedora is unstable: they are saying that Fedora
N+1 commonly behaves very differently from Fedora N, and even updates to
Fedora N can change its behaviour significantly. Whether Fedora is
'unstable' in sense #1 is a much more debatable point, and can change
drastically depending on your use case and the release of Fedora in
question.

Sense #2 instability can be a desired and desirable attribute, and
that's the case when it comes to Fedora: we *want* Fedora to be
'unstable' in this sense, because one of Fedora's purposes is to serve
as a venue for the development of interesting new technologies. Sense #1
instability is never desirable or desired, but it can sometimes be a
consequence of sense #2 instability, and so in working on a sense #2
instable product like Fedora, our job in mitigating sense #1 instability
becomes harder.

I hope that's useful to someone!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net