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
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