A request for more agressive updates to FC

[Carlos Rodrigues]

Hi!

This will be a bit long, so if you don't have anything better to do,
please bear with me.

Since the days of Red Hat Linux 5.0, when I started using Linux, I have
followed a ritual with every new release. The ritual consists in looking
around for stuff that used to work and is now broken. Fortunately, the
server related stuff seems to be immune to obvious regressions, but that
cannot be said of desktop related stuff. Some of these regressions are
easy to fix (and I sometimes fix them myself) but the fixes have to wait
for the next release, where other regressions pop up... This is a never
ending cycle.

In the days of Red Hat Linux, the situation was much worse, since the
only updates that appeared were security fixes (which are good), bug fix
updates were as rare as water in the desert. But today we are no much
better.

So, what I'm saying is that there should be a more agressive update
policy to Fedora Core, new packages should go into updates-testing and
then updates except if there is a good reason not to. Let's have gaim as
an example, it is a piece of software with many shortcomings and which
gets better with every release. It's also a non intrusive package, and
so the new gaim that pops up in updates every couple of weeks is a
welcomed update. However, there is a nut package in "development" that
fixes some configuration file ownership stuff that stays there, although
it has no other change from the version in FC2.

Stuff should never go into "development" unless there is a strong
reason, meaning "it breaks other packages", "it requires tons of
dependency updates, some of which possibly beaking other packages" or
"it changes basic stuff in the distro, like how initialization is done,
security is handled". FC2 should have a more evolutionary approach,
stuff like mozilla-1.7 should go directly into updates-testing. New FC
releases should mean big stuff like SELinux, kernel 2.6 and the likes,
meanwhile FC should be as close to development as possible (without that
big stuff).

Basically I'm saying that FC should be "development" without the
dangerous suff. After all this is a distro for hobbyists which like to
be as close to the bleeding-edge as possible, without actually bleeding.

Why do I say this? Because I feel that once a release is out, almost
everybody moves its attention onto the next one and forgets about us
folks. FC should not be the absolute bleeding edge, but it shouldn't
also be RHEL... evolution is needed. This would allow to squash bugs
earlier, meaning getting to a stable desktop (as in not crashing or
buggy, not feature-frozen) faster.

I'm kind of sick of being between a rock and a hard place, either I use
a bleeding-edge distro and spend all my time bleeding or I use a over
conservative distro and never get new features... Am I totally clueless?

Well, to be true, the same thing that I say above can be accomplished by 
turning "updates-testing" into some sort of half-way between FC and 
"development", more dynamic but not as risky.

Carlos Rodrigues


PS: I was prompted into this because in FC2 smb with GNOME is totally
broken (amongst other things), and even if a GNOME 2.6.2 gets out I know
that it will never come out, FC3 will bring 2.8 and new stuff will
break. It's actually funny (in a bad way) that GNOME gets released as
frequently as FC, which means we always get a .0 release and not the
following bug fixes... damn!

[Steve Brenneis]

Carlos,

Could you expand on what you mean by GNOME in FC2 SMB being totally
broken? Symptoms, etc.? I'm interested because that is my impression as
well. I haven't posted much about that here (avoiding troll branding),
but I would like to know what you are encountering. Maybe we can fix
some of them together.

Some of the issues I have with GNOME seem to have been there in FC1 as
well.

Just curious. Thanks.

Steve Brenneis
http://myorb.sourceforge.net

On Mon, 2004-07-26 at 19:58, Carlos Rodrigues wrote:
>  Hi!
>  
>  This will be a bit long, so if you don't have anything better to do,
>  please bear with me.
>  
>  Since the days of Red Hat Linux 5.0, when I started using Linux, I have
>  followed a ritual with every new release. The ritual consists in looking
>  around for stuff that used to work and is now broken. Fortunately, the
>  server related stuff seems to be immune to obvious regressions, but that
>  cannot be said of desktop related stuff. Some of these regressions are
>  easy to fix (and I sometimes fix them myself) but the fixes have to wait
>  for the next release, where other regressions pop up... This is a never
>  ending cycle.
>  
>  In the days of Red Hat Linux, the situation was much worse, since the
>  only updates that appeared were security fixes (which are good), bug fix
>  updates were as rare as water in the desert. But today we are no much
>  better.
>  
>  So, what I'm saying is that there should be a more agressive update
>  policy to Fedora Core, new packages should go into updates-testing and
>  then updates except if there is a good reason not to. Let's have gaim as
>  an example, it is a piece of software with many shortcomings and which
>  gets better with every release. It's also a non intrusive package, and
>  so the new gaim that pops up in updates every couple of weeks is a
>  welcomed update. However, there is a nut package in "development" that
>  fixes some configuration file ownership stuff that stays there, although
>  it has no other change from the version in FC2.
>  
>  Stuff should never go into "development" unless there is a strong
>  reason, meaning "it breaks other packages", "it requires tons of
>  dependency updates, some of which possibly beaking other packages" or
>  "it changes basic stuff in the distro, like how initialization is done,
>  security is handled". FC2 should have a more evolutionary approach,
>  stuff like mozilla-1.7 should go directly into updates-testing. New FC
>  releases should mean big stuff like SELinux, kernel 2.6 and the likes,
>  meanwhile FC should be as close to development as possible (without that
>  big stuff).
>  
>  Basically I'm saying that FC should be "development" without the
>  dangerous suff. After all this is a distro for hobbyists which like to
>  be as close to the bleeding-edge as possible, without actually bleeding.
>  
>  Why do I say this? Because I feel that once a release is out, almost
>  everybody moves its attention onto the next one and forgets about us
>  folks. FC should not be the absolute bleeding edge, but it shouldn't
>  also be RHEL... evolution is needed. This would allow to squash bugs
>  earlier, meaning getting to a stable desktop (as in not crashing or
>  buggy, not feature-frozen) faster.
>  
>  I'm kind of sick of being between a rock and a hard place, either I use
>  a bleeding-edge distro and spend all my time bleeding or I use a over
>  conservative distro and never get new features... Am I totally clueless?
>  
>  Well, to be true, the same thing that I say above can be accomplished by 
>  turning "updates-testing" into some sort of half-way between FC and 
>  "development", more dynamic but not as risky.
>  
>  Carlos Rodrigues
>  
>  
>  PS: I was prompted into this because in FC2 smb with GNOME is totally
>  broken (amongst other things), and even if a GNOME 2.6.2 gets out I know
>  that it will never come out, FC3 will bring 2.8 and new stuff will
>  break. It's actually funny (in a bad way) that GNOME gets released as
>  frequently as FC, which means we always get a .0 release and not the
>  following bug fixes... damn! 
-- 
Steve Brenneis <sbrenneis(a)surry.net&gt;

[Chuck Anderson]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2004 at 08:42:09PM -0400, Steve Brenneis wrote:
>  Could you expand on what you mean by GNOME in FC2 SMB being totally
>  broken? Symptoms, etc.? I'm interested because that is my impression as
>  well. I haven't posted much about that here (avoiding troll branding),
>  but I would like to know what you are encountering. Maybe we can fix
>  some of them together. 
The default firewall blocks responses to SMB queries.  In fact, the
firewall by default doesn't work for any broadcast or multicast based
protocols.  If you stop the iptables service or enter custom iptables
rules SMB browsing should work fine in FC2 GNOME.  See:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=113918

[Carlos Rodrigues]

Charles R. Anderson wrote:
>  The default firewall blocks responses to SMB queries.  In fact, the
>  firewall by default doesn't work for any broadcast or multicast based
>  protocols.  If you stop the iptables service or enter custom iptables
>  rules SMB browsing should work fine in FC2 GNOME.  See:
>  
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=113918 
That doesn't work for me, I do not have any firewall rules configured. 
At home iptables are stopped on my FC2 box, Windows XP has no firewall 
enabled on my sister's machine and my Red Hat 8.0 gateway/server (which 
does have a firewall) had no configuration changes (and it worked while 
my box had FC1 -- which it still has on another partition).

Carlos

[Carlos Rodrigues]

Steve Brenneis wrote:
>  Carlos,
>  
>  Could you expand on what you mean by GNOME in FC2 SMB being totally
>  broken? Symptoms, etc.? I'm interested because that is my impression as
>  well. I haven't posted much about that here (avoiding troll branding),
>  but I would like to know what you are encountering. Maybe we can fix
>  some of them together.
>  
>  Some of the issues I have with GNOME seem to have been there in FC1 as
>  well.
>  
>  Just curious. Thanks. 
In FC1 the smb support in nautilus actually worked quite well for me, at 
least at home (one Windows XP, one FC1 and one Red Hat 8.0). At work it 
could never browse the network, it always complained about the master 
browser (but I could access shares by address) which I could never quite 
debug since the network is filled with w2k, w98, w2k3 and samba shares 
and my machine is connected to two different networks... (this doesn't 
speak well for smb support in nautilus, but it was kind of experimental 
back then anyway...).

In FC2 the network browser shows nothing, and if I use the machine name 
directly I'm asked for a password even for completely public shares (eg. 
on the RedHat 8.0 machine). If I'm lucky I can use the share after this, 
but more often than not nautilus just crashes.
The samba tools seem to work fine however.

There are a couple of bugs filed about these problems, both to Red Hat's 
and GNOME's bugzilla:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=122292
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148295
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147204
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129890

Carlos Rodrigues

PS: actually I wasn't quite fair when bringing this problem up in the 
context of my last post because it isn't fixed upstream yet. However I 
think is just the kind of problem that gets "FIXED RAWHIDE" instead of 
"FIXED ERRATA" when upstream does fix it.

[Michael Favia]

I would love to see some of your suggestions implemented. I was thinking 
the same thing just yesterday. I dont know if it would ease or trouble 
the developent of the next FC but i like the idea of a distribution that 
incorporates the newer "addon" packages and stabalizes the core desktop 
environment (a sane technology testing platform if you will). I thought 
this was the charter of FC to begin with. Is it simply too time 
consuming to do this from redhats end (completely understandable if so)?
--Michael

[Florian La Roche]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 12:11:25PM -0500, Michael Favia wrote:
>  I would love to see some of your suggestions implemented. I was
> thinking 
>  the same thing just yesterday. I dont know if it would ease or trouble 
>  the developent of the next FC but i like the idea of a distribution that 
>  incorporates the newer "addon" packages and stabalizes the core desktop 
>  environment (a sane technology testing platform if you will). I thought 
>  this was the charter of FC to begin with. Is it simply too time 
>  consuming to do this from redhats end (completely understandable if so)? 
That's my understanding on where we want to go and I hope we make good
progress with this. FC1 has been very solid in my opinion. FC2 has kind
of rough corners with the big step to a 2.6 kernel and the starting point
to update many user level rpms plus really adding into a solid desktop.
Current FC3 looks nice to me, but I might be the wrong person to ask this.
(I tend to like all development trees.;-)

For your above comments: I'd wish system-config-packages plus some other
tools would be more connected and working better together. I am not
sure all that can be cleaned up within FC3 development timeframe. It's
a huge area to work on. The new repository support just going into
the Fedora development tree are again bits of this.

greetings,

Florian La Roche