Hi,
You will have noticed by now that my FESCo term is about to expire, that the nomination period for FESCo just closed and that my name does not show up on the list of candidates. No, this is not an accident or negligence, the decision not to run for another term was intentional, for several reasons:
* When I ran for election a year ago, one of my reasons for running, and also something I made part of my campaign, was that it shouldn't always be the same people who are sitting on FESCo. We have a much higher number of active contributors than FESCo seats, so it makes sense to see some turnover happening. So it would be very hypocritical from me to attempt to sit another year on FESCo myself, now that I'm myself a FESCo "veteran".
* I have never been a committee person and have always hated sitting on meetings. I have done it anyway for a year because I believed it to be important for the good of the project. But I'm really fed up of those meetings (I'm feeling burned out) and prefer focusing on more practical, less political areas of Fedora. The fact that I don't feel my presence in those meetings being of much if any use (more on that later) doesn't help either.
* When looking back at what happened over the year I've been in office, I have a feeling that I have been able to acheive basically nothing: - The vast majority of votes were either unanimous or 8-1 against me. In both cases, my vote was entirely redundant. Even for more contested votes, my vote hardly ever mattered. - Any attempts to discuss those issues where everyone was against me went nowhere. In most cases, people rushed out a vote without even considering the real issue at hand and then shot down any discussion with "we already voted, we want to move on". In those few cases where there actually was a discussion, my position was always dismissed as being ridiculous and not even worth considering, my arguments, no matter how strong, were entirely ignored. - Basically any proposal I filed was systematically shot down. Even things which should be obvious such as: . calling GNOME by its name rather than the generic "Desktop" or . eliminating the useless bureaucratic red tape of FESCo ratification for FPC guidelines which just wastes everyone's time and constitutes pure process inefficiency got only incomprehension. I have come to the conclusion that it is just plain impossible for a single person to change FESCo's ways and that therefore I am just wasting my time there.
* I am very unhappy about FESCo's recent (and not so recent, which were what made me run in the first place) directions. The trend is steady towards bureaucracy and centralization: - Maintainers are continuously being distrusted. It all started with the provenpackager policy, where every single provenpackager has to be voted in by a FESCo majority vote, as opposed to letting any sponsor approve people as provenpackagers as originally planned, or just opening all our packages to everyone as was the case in the old Extras. From there, things pretty much degenerated and we're now at a point where FESCo no longer trusts maintainers to know when an update to the packages they maintain is stable, instead insisting on automatically-enforced bureaucracy which will never be as reliable and effective as a human. The fact that we trust our maintainers used to be one of the core values of the Fedora community. It has been replaced by control-freakiness and paranoia. - All the power in Fedora is being centralized into 2 major committees: the Board and FESCo. FESCo is responsible for a lot of things all taking up meeting time, leading to lengthy meetings and little time for discussion. Many of those things could be handled better in a more decentralized way. Power should be delegated to SIGs and technical committees wherever possible, FESCo should only handle issues where no reponsible subcommittee can be found or where there is disagreement among affected committees. In particular, I suggest that: . FPC guidelines should be passed directly by FPC, only concrete objections should get escalated to FESCo. . membership in packager-sponsors and provenpackager should be handled by the sponsors, with a process to be defined by them (my suggestion: provenpackager should take 1 sponsor to approve and no possibility to object or veto, sponsor should take 3 sponsors to approve and objections can be escalated to FESCo). . features should get approved by the responsible SIG or committee (e.g. FPC for RPM features, KDE SIG for KDE features etc.). The feature wrangler should decide on a SIG to hand the feature to for approval, or even accept features filed directly into "approved" by the responsible SIG, and FESCo would be responsible only where there is no clearly responsible SIG, or to arbitrate when a SIG is trying to make a change which affects other SIGs without their consent. Unfortunately, these suggestions are falling on deaf ears, in fact I filed the first suggestion as an official proposal (as it looked very obvious to me, the ratification process is pure bureaucracy) and it was shot down (also due to the FPC chair claiming FPC doesn't want this, despite at least 2 FPC members having spoken out rather favorably). I think a more decentralized approach (in general, not just for FPC guidelines) would be more efficient, more democratic, less bureaucratic and less corporate and would increase overall maintainer happiness by reducing the impression of the "diktat from above". - The prevailing opinion of the electorate of Fedora contributors keeps getting ignored. Feedback on the Fedora devel mailing list is never seen as in any way binding, it's often dismissed as noise or "trolling". The predominant opinion in FESCo is "you voted for us, now we get to do whatever we want", which is flawed in many ways: . It assumes there were true alternatives to vote for instead. This assumption does not look true to me. . It assumes the voters were aware of the positions of all the candidates. I'm fairly sure this was not the case. While I appreciate what has been done in an attempt to solve this issue (questionnaire, townhalls), this has proven by far insufficient to build an opinion on the candidates. I think there's a reason representative democracies normally work with parties/factions and I think something like that might help a lot, depending on what kind of factions would show up. . It assumes representative democracy is a well-working model in the first place, especially in its most hardcore form ("now we get to do whatever we want"). I believe elected representatives should really REPRESENT the people who voted them. I realize politicians aren't doing that, but are they really a good model to follow? I believe listening more to the feedback on the devel ML and taking it into account during decision-making would reduce frustration with FESCo a lot. - The prevailing opinion of Fedora users keeps getting ignored. See e.g. Adam Williamson's poll about the kind of updates users expect from Fedora, its clearcut majoritarian result, and FESCo and the Board both planning to do the exact opposite. - Common sense is just generally lacking, see e.g. the decision that the GNOME spin should continue being called "Desktop Spin", despite evidence that this is confusing many users, both the ones actively looking for GNOME and the ones who want some other desktop. And that's just one such nonsensical decision, the one I remember best because this is an issue I care much about. I do not wish to stand for such a committee anymore (in fact I probably should have resigned much earlier, as I've just been frustrated and burned out for more than half of the term, but I didn't because my feeling of responsibility was too strong) and, as pointed out before, I feel powerless to change anything.
Therefore, I will stay in office until the end of my term, but I will not be available for reelection. I would like to thank the people who voted for me last year for their support and apologize to those who would have liked to vote for me this time for not giving them this opportunity. If you would like a KDE SIG person in FESCo, vote for Steven M. Parrish (and vote for Rex Dieter for the Board). But if you want to see the kind of change to FESCo I'd like to see, it'll take a faction of at least 5 people to make it happen.
Kevin Kofler
On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 7:20 PM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Hi,
You will have noticed by now that my FESCo term is about to expire, that the nomination period for FESCo just closed and that my name does not show up on the list of candidates. No, this is not an accident or negligence, the decision not to run for another term was intentional, for several reasons:
- When I ran for election a year ago, one of my reasons for running, and
also something I made part of my campaign, was that it shouldn't always be the same people who are sitting on FESCo. We have a much higher number of active contributors than FESCo seats, so it makes sense to see some turnover happening. So it would be very hypocritical from me to attempt to sit another year on FESCo myself, now that I'm myself a FESCo "veteran".
- I have never been a committee person and have always hated sitting on
meetings. I have done it anyway for a year because I believed it to be important for the good of the project. But I'm really fed up of those meetings (I'm feeling burned out) and prefer focusing on more practical, less political areas of Fedora. The fact that I don't feel my presence in those meetings being of much if any use (more on that later) doesn't help either.
- When looking back at what happened over the year I've been in office, I
have a feeling that I have been able to acheive basically nothing:
- The vast majority of votes were either unanimous or 8-1 against me. In
both cases, my vote was entirely redundant. Even for more contested votes, my vote hardly ever mattered.
- Any attempts to discuss those issues where everyone was against me went nowhere. In most cases, people rushed out a vote without even
considering the real issue at hand and then shot down any discussion with "we already voted, we want to move on". In those few cases where there actually was a discussion, my position was always dismissed as being ridiculous and not even worth considering, my arguments, no matter how strong, were entirely ignored.
- Basically any proposal I filed was systematically shot down. Even things which should be obvious such as: . calling GNOME by its name rather than the generic "Desktop" or . eliminating the useless bureaucratic red tape of FESCo ratification
for FPC guidelines which just wastes everyone's time and constitutes pure process inefficiency got only incomprehension. I have come to the conclusion that it is just plain impossible for a single person to change FESCo's ways and that therefore I am just wasting my time there.
- I am very unhappy about FESCo's recent (and not so recent, which were
what made me run in the first place) directions. The trend is steady towards bureaucracy and centralization:
- Maintainers are continuously being distrusted. It all started with the provenpackager policy, where every single provenpackager has to be voted
in by a FESCo majority vote, as opposed to letting any sponsor approve people as provenpackagers as originally planned, or just opening all our packages to everyone as was the case in the old Extras. From there, things pretty much degenerated and we're now at a point where FESCo no longer trusts maintainers to know when an update to the packages they maintain is stable, instead insisting on automatically-enforced bureaucracy which will never be as reliable and effective as a human. The fact that we trust our maintainers used to be one of the core values of the Fedora community. It has been replaced by control-freakiness and paranoia.
- All the power in Fedora is being centralized into 2 major committees:
the Board and FESCo. FESCo is responsible for a lot of things all taking up meeting time, leading to lengthy meetings and little time for discussion. Many of those things could be handled better in a more decentralized way. Power should be delegated to SIGs and technical committees wherever possible, FESCo should only handle issues where no reponsible subcommittee can be found or where there is disagreement among affected committees. In particular, I suggest that: . FPC guidelines should be passed directly by FPC, only concrete objections should get escalated to FESCo. . membership in packager-sponsors and provenpackager should be handled by the sponsors, with a process to be defined by them (my suggestion: provenpackager should take 1 sponsor to approve and no possibility to object or veto, sponsor should take 3 sponsors to approve and objections can be escalated to FESCo). . features should get approved by the responsible SIG or committee (e.g. FPC for RPM features, KDE SIG for KDE features etc.). The feature wrangler should decide on a SIG to hand the feature to for approval, or even accept features filed directly into "approved" by the responsible SIG, and FESCo would be responsible only where there is no clearly responsible SIG, or to arbitrate when a SIG is trying to make a change which affects other SIGs without their consent. Unfortunately, these suggestions are falling on deaf ears, in fact I filed the first suggestion as an official proposal (as it looked very obvious to me, the ratification process is pure bureaucracy) and it was shot down (also due to the FPC chair claiming FPC doesn't want this, despite at least 2 FPC members having spoken out rather favorably). I think a more decentralized approach (in general, not just for FPC guidelines) would be more efficient, more democratic, less bureaucratic and less corporate and would increase overall maintainer happiness by reducing the impression of the "diktat from above".
- The prevailing opinion of the electorate of Fedora contributors keeps getting ignored. Feedback on the Fedora devel mailing list is never seen
as in any way binding, it's often dismissed as noise or "trolling". The predominant opinion in FESCo is "you voted for us, now we get to do whatever we want", which is flawed in many ways: . It assumes there were true alternatives to vote for instead. This assumption does not look true to me. . It assumes the voters were aware of the positions of all the candidates. I'm fairly sure this was not the case. While I appreciate what has been done in an attempt to solve this issue (questionnaire, townhalls), this has proven by far insufficient to build an opinion on the candidates. I think there's a reason representative democracies normally work with parties/factions and I think something like that might help a lot, depending on what kind of factions would show up. . It assumes representative democracy is a well-working model in the first place, especially in its most hardcore form ("now we get to do whatever we want"). I believe elected representatives should really REPRESENT the people who voted them. I realize politicians aren't doing that, but are they really a good model to follow? I believe listening more to the feedback on the devel ML and taking it into account during decision-making would reduce frustration with FESCo a lot.
- The prevailing opinion of Fedora users keeps getting ignored. See e.g.
Adam Williamson's poll about the kind of updates users expect from Fedora, its clearcut majoritarian result, and FESCo and the Board both planning to do the exact opposite.
- Common sense is just generally lacking, see e.g. the decision that the
GNOME spin should continue being called "Desktop Spin", despite evidence that this is confusing many users, both the ones actively looking for GNOME and the ones who want some other desktop. And that's just one such nonsensical decision, the one I remember best because this is an issue I care much about. I do not wish to stand for such a committee anymore (in fact I probably should have resigned much earlier, as I've just been frustrated and burned out for more than half of the term, but I didn't because my feeling of responsibility was too strong) and, as pointed out before, I feel powerless to change anything.
Therefore, I will stay in office until the end of my term, but I will not be available for reelection. I would like to thank the people who voted for me last year for their support and apologize to those who would have liked to vote for me this time for not giving them this opportunity. If you would like a KDE SIG person in FESCo, vote for Steven M. Parrish (and vote for Rex Dieter for the Board). But if you want to see the kind of change to FESCo I'd like to see, it'll take a faction of at least 5 people to make it happen.
Kevin Kofler
That's too bad. I hadn't realized the political situation within Fedora had gotten so bad, though. I always liked Fedora's policy of trusting its people.... And it seems to be going away.
Though, there are some instances where the prevailing opinion should be ignored, when there is no solid evidence to back it up, e.g. Mono and the like.
Meh, sorry to see you felt so unsatisfied though.
Unfortunately, what I have seen over time is that Fedora is changing to something that worries me and that is getting less fun to contribute. I remember the time when I liked to say that fedora was the "voice of the community". ------------------------------ Henrique "LonelySpooky" Junior
________________________________ De: Sir Gallantmon (ニール・ゴンパ) ngompa13@gmail.com Para: Development discussions related to Fedora devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Enviadas: Domingo, 2 de Maio de 2010 22:11:21 Assunto: Re: Open Letter: Why I, Kevin Kofler, am not rerunning for FESCo
On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 7:20 PM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Hi,
You will have noticed by now that my FESCo term is about to expire, that the nomination period for FESCo just closed and that my name does not show up on the list of candidates. No, this is not an accident or negligence, the decision not to run for another term was intentional, for several reasons:
- When I ran for election a year ago, one of my reasons for running, and also
something I made part of my campaign, was that it shouldn't always be the same people who are sitting on FESCo. We have a much higher number of active contributors than FESCo seats, so it makes sense to see some turnover happening. So it would be very hypocritical from me to attempt to sit another year on FESCo myself, now that I'm myself a FESCo "veteran".
- I have never been a committee person and have always hated sitting on
meetings. I have done it anyway for a year because I believed it to be important for the good of the project. But I'm really fed up of those meetings (I'm feeling burned out) and prefer focusing on more practical, less political areas of Fedora. The fact that I don't feel my presence in those meetings being of much if any use (more on that later) doesn't help either.
- When looking back at what happened over the year I've been in office, I have a
feeling that I have been able to acheive basically nothing:
- The vast majority of votes were either unanimous or 8-1 against me. In both cases, my vote was entirely redundant. Even for more contested votes, my vote hardly ever mattered.
- Any attempts to discuss those issues where everyone was against me went nowhere. In most cases, people rushed out a vote without even considering the real issue at hand and then shot down any discussion with "we already voted, we want to move on". In those few cases where there actually was a discussion, my position was always dismissed as being ridiculous and not even worth considering, my arguments, no matter how strong, were entirely ignored.
- Basically any proposal I filed was systematically shot down. Even things which should be obvious such as: . calling GNOME by its name rather than the generic "Desktop" or . eliminating the useless bureaucratic red tape of FESCo ratification for FPC guidelines which just wastes everyone's time and constitutes pure process inefficiency got only incomprehension.
I have come to the conclusion that it is just plain impossible for a single person to change FESCo's ways and that therefore I am just wasting my time there.
- I am very unhappy about FESCo's recent (and not so recent, which were what
made me run in the first place) directions. The trend is steady towards bureaucracy and centralization:
- Maintainers are continuously being distrusted. It all started with the provenpackager policy, where every single provenpackager has to be voted in by a FESCo majority vote, as opposed to letting any sponsor approve people as provenpackagers as originally planned, or just opening all our packages to everyone as was the case in the old Extras. From there, things pretty much degenerated and we're now at a point where FESCo no longer trusts maintainers to know when an update to the packages they maintain is stable, instead insisting on automatically-enforced bureaucracy which will never be as reliable and effective as a human. The fact that we trust our maintainers used to be one of the core values of the Fedora community. It has been replaced by control-freakiness and paranoia.
- All the power in Fedora is being centralized into 2 major committees: the Board and FESCo. FESCo is responsible for a lot of things all taking up meeting time, leading to lengthy meetings and little time for discussion. Many of those things could be handled better in a more decentralized way. Power should be delegated to SIGs and technical committees wherever possible, FESCo should only handle issues where no reponsible subcommittee can be found or where there is disagreement among affected committees. In particular, I suggest that: . FPC guidelines should be passed directly by FPC, only concrete objections should get escalated to FESCo. . membership in packager-sponsors and provenpackager should be handled by the sponsors, with a process to be defined by them (my suggestion: provenpackager should take 1 sponsor to approve and no possibility to object or veto, sponsor should take 3 sponsors to approve and objections can be escalated to FESCo). . features should get approved by the responsible SIG or committee (e.g. FPC for RPM features, KDE SIG for KDE features etc.). The feature wrangler should decide on a SIG to hand the feature to for approval, or even accept features filed directly into "approved" by the responsible SIG, and FESCo would be responsible only where there is no clearly responsible SIG, or to arbitrate when a SIG is trying to make a change which affects other SIGs without their consent. Unfortunately, these suggestions are falling on deaf ears, in fact I filed the first suggestion as an official proposal (as it looked very obvious to me, the ratification process is pure bureaucracy) and it was shot down (also due to the FPC chair claiming FPC doesn't want this, despite at least 2 FPC members having spoken out rather favorably). I think a more decentralized approach (in general, not just for FPC guidelines) would be more efficient, more democratic, less bureaucratic and less corporate and would increase overall maintainer happiness by reducing the impression of the "diktat from above".
- The prevailing opinion of the electorate of Fedora contributors keeps getting ignored. Feedback on the Fedora devel mailing list is never seen as in any way binding, it's often dismissed as noise or "trolling". The predominant opinion in FESCo is "you voted for us, now we get to do whatever we want", which is flawed in many ways: . It assumes there were true alternatives to vote for instead. This assumption does not look true to me. . It assumes the voters were aware of the positions of all the candidates. I'm fairly sure this was not the case. While I appreciate what has been done in an attempt to solve this issue (questionnaire, townhalls), this has proven by far insufficient to build an opinion on the candidates. I think there's a reason representative democracies normally work with parties/factions and I think something like that might help a lot, depending on what kind of factions would show up. . It assumes representative democracy is a well-working model in the first place, especially in its most hardcore form ("now we get to do whatever we want"). I believe elected representatives should really REPRESENT the people who voted them. I realize politicians aren't doing that, but are they really a good model to follow? I believe listening more to the feedback on the devel ML and taking it into account during decision-making would reduce frustration with FESCo a lot.
- The prevailing opinion of Fedora users keeps getting ignored. See e.g. Adam Williamson's poll about the kind of updates users expect from Fedora, its clearcut majoritarian result, and FESCo and the Board both planning to do the exact opposite.
- Common sense is just generally lacking, see e.g. the decision that the GNOME spin should continue being called "Desktop Spin", despite evidence that this is confusing many users, both the ones actively looking for GNOME and the ones who want some other desktop. And that's just one such nonsensical decision, the one I remember best because this is an issue I care much about.
I do not wish to stand for such a committee anymore (in fact I probably should have resigned much earlier, as I've just been frustrated and burned out for more than half of the term, but I didn't because my feeling of responsibility was too strong) and, as pointed out before, I feel powerless to change anything.
Therefore, I will stay in office until the end of my term, but I will not be available for reelection. I would like to thank the people who voted for me last year for their support and apologize to those who would have liked to vote for me this time for not giving them this opportunity. If you would like a KDE SIG person in FESCo, vote for Steven M. Parrish (and vote for Rex Dieter for the Board). But if you want to see the kind of change to FESCo I'd like to see, it'll take a faction of at least 5 people to make it happen.
Kevin Kofler
That's too bad. I hadn't realized the political situation within Fedora had gotten so bad, though. I always liked Fedora's policy of trusting its people.... And it seems to be going away.
Though, there are some instances where the prevailing opinion should be ignored, when there is no solid evidence to back it up, e.g. Mono and the like.
Meh, sorry to see you felt so unsatisfied though.
On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 07:02:23PM -0700, Henrique Junior wrote:
Unfortunately, what I have seen over time is that Fedora is changing to something that worries me and that is getting less fun to contribute. I remember the time when I liked to say that fedora was the "voice of the community".
It's important for individual contributors to have fun, but it's also worth remembering that one person's fun can cause inconvenience to others.[1] We have rules about ABI breaks because we don't want one maintainer to be able to cause distruption that results in several other people having to spend time cleaning up after them. Maybe that's less fun for the library maintainer, but it means that others have less fun overall.
The stable packages work is an extension of this. Even if we, as maintainers, have plenty of fun, that's pretty easily wiped out if even a small proportion of our users have to spend time fixing a system that a stable update has broken. And without users who enjoy using and talking about Fedora, the entire exercise is pointless. Fesco isn't introducing rules because it wants our developers to become rule-bound drones, but because it wants our developers to actually be able to see people using what those developers produce and interact with a community of people who *use* Fedora, not just people who develop it. Personally, I think it's reasonable to ask developers to do slightly more work if it means our users have to do significantly less.
[1] And I appreciate that I made a mistake with hal-storage in this cycle that caused inconvenience for people maintaining other spins, so I'm not going to claim any kind of perfection in this area
Matthew Garrett wrote:
The stable packages work is an extension of this. Even if we, as maintainers, have plenty of fun, that's pretty easily wiped out if even a small proportion of our users have to spend time fixing a system that a stable update has broken. And without users who enjoy using and talking about Fedora, the entire exercise is pointless. Fesco isn't introducing rules because it wants our developers to become rule-bound drones, but because it wants our developers to actually be able to see people using what those developers produce and interact with a community of people who *use* Fedora, not just people who develop it. Personally, I think it's reasonable to ask developers to do slightly more work if it means our users have to do significantly less.
You make it look as if I was out to break people's systems, when actually what I'm arguing for is: * allowing important bugfixes to bypass testing IN SOME CASES (i.e. if they aren't too risky/non-trivial), in order to get very needed bugfixes (e.g. regression fixes) out to our users faster and make them suffer LESS, * allowing trivial changes to bypass testing IN SOME CASES (i.e. if they are important/useful enough) because there's hardly any way they can break anything, in order to get ultra-low-risk improvements out to our users faster and make them suffer LESS, * allowing new upstream releases as updates IF AND ONLY IF THEY DON'T BREAK THINGS (with a very precise definition of "break things" I don't want to repeat again) and after sufficient regression testing and fixing, bringing both new features and bugfixes to our users without the breakage of an unstable distribution such as Rawhide and thus making them suffer LESS.
Please stop attacking a strawman!
Kevin Kofler
On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 04:34:13PM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
You make it look as if I was out to break people's systems
Actually, I didn't intend to say anything about you. My point was that any increased bureaucracy has not been generated with the intention to reduce the amount of fun that developers have. If developers /do/ feel that their ability to have fun in Fedora has been reduced, I hope that in the long run that that gets more than compensated for by more positive feedback from our users and fewer angry complaints when people's systems break.
- allowing important bugfixes to bypass testing IN SOME CASES (i.e. if they
aren't too risky/non-trivial), in order to get very needed bugfixes (e.g. regression fixes) out to our users faster and make them suffer LESS,
If updates cause regressions in functionality then that indicates that our update testing process failed. The answer to that is to fix the update testing process, not bypass it.
- allowing trivial changes to bypass testing IN SOME CASES (i.e. if they are
important/useful enough) because there's hardly any way they can break anything, in order to get ultra-low-risk improvements out to our users faster and make them suffer LESS,
There is no change too trivial to not require testing. The software industry is full of examples of obviously correct fixes causing hideous breakage. Most developers get to learn that the hard way at some point, but it's still preferable to put processes in place to protect users from accidents.
- allowing new upstream releases as updates IF AND ONLY IF THEY DON'T BREAK
THINGS (with a very precise definition of "break things" I don't want to repeat again) and after sufficient regression testing and fixing, bringing both new features and bugfixes to our users without the breakage of an unstable distribution such as Rawhide and thus making them suffer LESS.
Regardless of your definition, there were several users who felt that the KDE 4.4 update broke things. That's a problem. It makes us look bad. We'd like to avoid those users being unhappy.
Matthew Garrett wrote:
My point was that any increased bureaucracy has not been generated with the intention to reduce the amount of fun that developers have.
Let me jump in just to say that I'm not a developer/packager, but it was my intention to become a contributor for Fedora. What scared me was just the huge level of bureaucracy. Submitting patches to the kernel 10 years ago was actually simpler than packaging a trivial rpm for Fedora is today.
This is why I decided to not by a packager. I just try to help guys on the lists and open bugs (often ignored, I must add).
Best regards.
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 04:34:13PM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
You make it look as if I was out to break people's systems
Actually, I didn't intend to say anything about you. My point was that any increased bureaucracy has not been generated with the intention to reduce the amount of fun that developers have. If developers /do/ feel that their ability to have fun in Fedora has been reduced, I hope that in the long run that that gets more than compensated for by more positive feedback from our users and fewer angry complaints when people's systems break.
- allowing important bugfixes to bypass testing IN SOME CASES (i.e. if they
aren't too risky/non-trivial), in order to get very needed bugfixes (e.g. regression fixes) out to our users faster and make them suffer LESS,
If updates cause regressions in functionality then that indicates that our update testing process failed. The answer to that is to fix the update testing process, not bypass it.
- allowing trivial changes to bypass testing IN SOME CASES (i.e. if they are
important/useful enough) because there's hardly any way they can break anything, in order to get ultra-low-risk improvements out to our users faster and make them suffer LESS,
There is no change too trivial to not require testing. The software industry is full of examples of obviously correct fixes causing hideous breakage. Most developers get to learn that the hard way at some point, but it's still preferable to put processes in place to protect users from accidents.
- allowing new upstream releases as updates IF AND ONLY IF THEY DON'T BREAK
THINGS (with a very precise definition of "break things" I don't want to repeat again) and after sufficient regression testing and fixing, bringing both new features and bugfixes to our users without the breakage of an unstable distribution such as Rawhide and thus making them suffer LESS.
Regardless of your definition, there were several users who felt that the KDE 4.4 update broke things. That's a problem. It makes us look bad. We'd like to avoid those users being unhappy.
Agreed on your points made above. The process for testing updates will most likely never be perfect, but i have a good feeling we will get a good system. Otherwise we (fedora community) have a good and loud mob ;p
Matthew Garrett wrote:
If updates cause regressions in functionality then that indicates that our update testing process failed. The answer to that is to fix the update testing process, not bypass it.
Your assumption there is that it is possible for a testing process to catch ALL regressions. I couldn't disagree more, and so far evidence has proven me right. For example, the critical path process, upon which the new update process is modeled, failed to catch the regressions in non-GNOME spins you caused by splitting out hal-storage-addon to a subpackage. NO amount of testing will EVER catch ALL regressions before they hit users. There will ALWAYS be a need for a way to fasttrack regression fixes! (And in fact a direct stable push is how we fixed the KDE spin.)
There is no change too trivial to not require testing. The software industry is full of examples of obviously correct fixes causing hideous breakage. Most developers get to learn that the hard way at some point, but it's still preferable to put processes in place to protect users from accidents.
While you do have a point in principle, in practice, our maintainers are quite good at judging the risk of their changes, and often the risk is so extremely low that it is far outweighed by the benefits of getting the change out ASAP. This is always a tradeoff. And 100% bugfreeness doesn't exist anyway, testing is NOT going to catch all issues either.
There is a point at which the risk is so low that other real-world risks such as hardware failure are several orders of magnitude larger. So why bother worrying about such a low risk?
Regardless of your definition, there were several users who felt that the KDE 4.4 update broke things. That's a problem. It makes us look bad. We'd like to avoid those users being unhappy.
It is true that KDE 4.4 wasn't as smooth as we had hoped for some users. This is strange, because for most of us, things just worked! I'll note that KDE 4.4 got A LOT of testing, and all testing indicated that we are good to go. We would NOT have pushed this out if we hadn't been convinced that our update is regression-free. This is just yet another proof that testing will NEVER catch ALL issues. What happened was that: * the Akonadi migration seems to be fragile in some ways, and choke on various corner cases, often of unknown nature. This did not show up during testing. For most of the issues, KDE UserBase offers workarounds. * Akonadi needs manual configuration to work with NFS home directories. We were not aware of this when we pushed 4.4 out and none of our testers was using this configuration. This issue can be worked around by the user by following the instructions on KDE UserBase, which detail the required manual configuration. * we underestimated the annoyance factor of a warning Akonadi pops up if Nepomuk is not running. (This warning is mostly harmless at this time. It just means that some Akonadi functionality is disabled.) This has been remedied by a kde-settings update which enables Nepomuk by default.
It shall however be noted that the Akonadi migration is a one-time event (well, there will be a second part in KDE 4.5, but once that's done too, the migration problem is solved), so I don't expect this kind of issues in future KDE upgrades. (In fact, we had NO similar complaints for our previous 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 upgrades.)
And IMHO most of the blame for the roughness of the Akonadi migration goes to upstream KDE. If we had been aware of the issues this is causing, we would have evaluated alternatives (e.g. staying on kdepim 4.3, or shipping the pre-Akonadi kdepim-enterprise4 branch). But all the feedback we got at the time of the decision pointed to the migration being trouble-free, and in fact I still believe that for the vast majority of our users, it was. You only hear from the handful people who ran into trouble. And we also need to weigh those against the people for whom KDE 4.4 fixed their issues. It has fixed thousands of bugs!
Kevin Kofler
Once upon a time, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at said:
Matthew Garrett wrote:
<snip>
Can we PLEASE not rehash all of this again?
Thanks a lot Kevin; you showed a lot of class trying to stir up the same arguments that you stirred up before. Maybe the reason you lost votes is that a lot of people just don't agree with you; pouting about that won't help anything.
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 8:00 PM, Chris Adams cmadams@hiwaay.net wrote:
Once upon a time, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at said:
Matthew Garrett wrote:
<snip>
Can we PLEASE not rehash all of this again?
Generally agreed.
Maybe the reason you lost votes is that a lot of people just don't agree with you
Doesn't automatically mean they are right. And they aren't right if it comes to "the" Desktop. They just like it and don't want to change it. For whatever reason.
pouting about that won't help anything.
To not speak up as well not. Arguments are arguments, even the other side don't like them, doesn't make them smaller.
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Chris Adams cmadams@hiwaay.net wrote:
Thanks a lot Kevin; you showed a lot of class trying to stir up the same arguments that you stirred up before. Maybe the reason you lost votes is that a lot of people just don't agree with you; pouting about that won't help anything.
There's no reason to paint this as a sour grapes issue. I'm pretty sure Kevin strongly believes that some decision-making is not in the best interest of the project... its not sour grapes to be persistent in that belief. It's difficult being cast into the role of loyal opposition (whether by choice or by calculation.) especially when you don't enjoy that role and being in that position burns you out.
-jef
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 18:45 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
here will ALWAYS be a need for a way to fasttrack regression fixes!
The proposals I've seen include a way to fasttrack. That is you get the required karma between the time the update was submitted to bodhi, and the time a bodhi admin starts the push. In such cases your update would go directly to stable. How is that not a fast track?
Jesse Keating wrote:
The proposals I've seen include a way to fasttrack. That is you get the required karma between the time the update was submitted to bodhi, and the time a bodhi admin starts the push. In such cases your update would go directly to stable. How is that not a fast track?
Because it requires getting karma. That's usually not fast at all, especially if you enforce that karma should not be given out without testing.
Kevin Kofler
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 23:49 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
The proposals I've seen include a way to fasttrack. That is you get the required karma between the time the update was submitted to bodhi, and the time a bodhi admin starts the push. In such cases your update would go directly to stable. How is that not a fast track?
Because it requires getting karma. That's usually not fast at all, especially if you enforce that karma should not be given out without testing.
Kevin Kofler
Testing takes time, lets give up? Seriously? Pushes happen about once every 24 hours, do you really say it'll take longer than 24 hours to get a couple people to test the issue and confirm that your fix does indeed fix the issue, and doesn't seem to create any other immediately noticeable issues?
On 5/4/2010 12:57 AM, Jesse Keating wrote:
Testing takes time, lets give up? Seriously? Pushes happen about once every 24 hours, do you really say it'll take longer than 24 hours to get a couple people to test the issue and confirm that your fix does indeed fix the issue, and doesn't seem to create any other immediately noticeable issues?
At the risk of putting words into Kevin's mouth, I think that you just made his point. I'd be very surprised if Kevin couldn't get x number of people to say yes to a fix that he considered urgent. This might confirm that the fix had its expected consequence, but I think that he already knew that or he wouldn't be trying to push it to stable. It wouldn't say much for stability or edge cases, only a good regression suite would give confidence on that score.
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 01:27 +0300, shmuel siegel wrote:
At the risk of putting words into Kevin's mouth, I think that you just made his point. I'd be very surprised if Kevin couldn't get x number of people to say yes to a fix that he considered urgent. This might confirm that the fix had its expected consequence, but I think that he already knew that or he wouldn't be trying to push it to stable. It wouldn't say much for stability or edge cases, only a good regression suite would give confidence on that score.
The point here is that Kevin isn't perfect. As such, he can make mistakes, just like all of us. By asking for a couple karma nods from different people, we increase the chance of catching some of those mistakes. Since the delay exists anyway, it doesn't seem to be that big of a deal to me to make sure a couple people test it and comment as such during that delay.
On 05/03/2010 10:30 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
The point here is that Kevin isn't perfect. As such, he can make mistakes, just like all of us. By asking for a couple karma nods from different people, we increase the chance of catching some of those mistakes. Since the delay exists anyway, it doesn't seem to be that big of a deal to me to make sure a couple people test it and comment as such during that delay.
Agreed.
For example we had a bug in one of the previous release were a relativity harmless "fix" in the maintainers eye ( which I do believe he tested locally before updating the package ) broke all non US keyboard layouts ( if I can recall correctly actually reset or set the keyboard layout setting to US or deleted the previous stored layout) luckily for us he did not act impatiently but pushed it to updates-testing were we were able to capture it before it hit mainstream. This could have proven disastrous but it did not thanx to this process.
Now if maintainers wants to wield the power of pushing straight to update without having to have his update lay for few hours/day's in update-testing it is my firm opinion that he should be.. a) a upstream maintainer b) have flawless bugzilla interaction, c) have very active upstream interaction encase a) is false and d) upstream is ACTIVE. Encase of a mishap we need to be sure that the maintainer can act quickly ( from the first report in after he pushed that update ) if needed but before granting that access we seriously need to start tracking and visualize ( graph ) component action both in bugzilla and in bodhi to identify which maintainers and their components can be granted that access.
You must all realize that the ratio of bureaucracy/process burden and quality of maintainers/packagers go hand in hand. The better the maintainers/packagers/components are less bureaucracy/process burden is needed. The worse it gets more bureaucracy/process burden is needed. If ye all feel that the bureaucracy/process burden is increasing that only means that the quality of maintainers and their components is going down.. ( we might be getting more components inn in less quality ).
JBG
"Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
You must all realize that the ratio of bureaucracy/process burden and quality of maintainers/packagers go hand in hand. The better the maintainers/packagers/components are less bureaucracy/process burden is needed. The worse it gets more bureaucracy/process burden is needed. If ye all feel that the bureaucracy/process burden is increasing that only means that the quality of maintainers and their components is going down.. ( we might be getting more components inn in less quality ).
If our maintainers suck, bureaucracy is not a good solution to fix that problem.
But we already have a group of trusted maintainers, it's called "provenpackager". We could give provenpackagers the power to push directly to stable without any karma requirements.
Kevin Kofler
On 05/04/2010 09:50 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
"Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
You must all realize that the ratio of bureaucracy/process burden and quality of maintainers/packagers go hand in hand. The better the maintainers/packagers/components are less bureaucracy/process burden is needed. The worse it gets more bureaucracy/process burden is needed. If ye all feel that the bureaucracy/process burden is increasing that only means that the quality of maintainers and their components is going down.. ( we might be getting more components inn in less quality ).
If our maintainers suck, bureaucracy is not a good solution to fix that problem.
You keep saying that, and it just shows a complete disregard for testing in general. Asking people to test it and simply flag that they've done so with success (or not) is very much not bureaucracy.
But we already have a group of trusted maintainers, it's called "provenpackager". We could give provenpackagers the power to push directly to stable without any karma requirements.
We trust their intent and their ability, because that's reasonable. We don't trust that they never make mistakes, because that's insane. We all make mistakes. The karma system is an attempt to mitigate the damage when that (very frequent) eventuality occurs.
I'm sorry you don't like it, but you've had ample occasion to come up with a better idea, and you have roundly refused to make any attempt at doing so.
Peter Jones wrote:
I'm sorry you don't like it, but you've had ample occasion to come up with a better idea, and you have roundly refused to make any attempt at doing so.
"I'm sorry you don't like my plate of Merde Provençale, but you've had ample occation to come up with a better recipe for feces, and you have roundly refused to make any attempt at doing so."
See the problem there? (Hint: the basic assumption that you want to eat sh*t in the first place!)
You were only interested in "better ideas" under a very narrow initial assumption which I don't share. Of course I was not interested in trying to coming up with "better ideas" under those conditions, as I don't believe that to be possible in the first place. You did not give any consideration to the fact that your initial premises may be broken and incorrect (which they happen to be).
You keep saying that, and it just shows a complete disregard for testing in general. Asking people to test it and simply flag that they've done so with success (or not) is very much not bureaucracy.
I don't believe testing to be the answer to everything. It's far from infallible, it's also not the only possible form of QA. There are changes which don't need testing, for example if a patch was dropped because we thought it wasn't needed anymore, and it turns out the patch is still needed, readding the patch needs no testing whatsoever because the patch has ALREADY been tested, plus it's fixing a regression. This is why the latest qt update went out straight to stable. And no, testing did NOT catch the regression. Right after the update went stable, we got the report. You have to accept that most users will NOT try out a package until after it hits stable.
We trust their intent and their ability, because that's reasonable. We don't trust that they never make mistakes, because that's insane. We all make mistakes. The karma system is an attempt to mitigate the damage when that (very frequent) eventuality occurs.
You need to prove that "very frequent" assertion. I don't see this as being true at all, quite the opposite. It almost never happens with the current system. Maintainers ALREADY use testing and keep feedback into account. Why do we need to FORCE them to? We should TRUST our maintainers!
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 19:40 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
There are changes which don't need testing, for example if a patch was dropped because we thought it wasn't needed anymore, and it turns out the patch is still needed, readding the patch needs no testing whatsoever because the patch has ALREADY been tested, plus it's fixing a regression.
This involved doing another build of the package, which could involve changes in the buildroot and anomalies in the build process. Ask DaveJ some time about what happened to his kernel builds when the build host did a clock adjustment during the build. Shit happens, and making assumptions that just because the build completed that nothing went wrong is a great way to make a fool of yourself.
Jesse Keating wrote:
This involved doing another build of the package, which could involve changes in the buildroot and anomalies in the build process. Ask DaveJ some time about what happened to his kernel builds when the build host did a clock adjustment during the build. Shit happens, and making assumptions that just because the build completed that nothing went wrong is a great way to make a fool of yourself.
Some risks are so low that they're basically negligible. If the 2 options are keeping an existing regression (which missed testing) in updates for a few more days or risking the off chance that there MAY be another regression with a probability of 1 in a million or something in that order of magnitude, I'll take the risk any day! If that kind of risk is too high for you, I hope you don't ever use a car, it might crash, you know?
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 2:14 PM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Some risks are so low that they're basically negligible. If the 2 options are keeping an existing regression (which missed testing) in updates for a few more days or risking the off chance that there MAY be another regression with a probability of 1 in a million or something in that order of magnitude, I'll take the risk any day!
Then do take that risk yourself. And propose to like-minded users that they enable updates-testing.
Nothing needs to change in Fedora. Normal users use it as is, danger-loving users enable updates-testing. Everyone gets what they want.
You are missing, however, that the risks are much higher, and materialise often. I've seen many obviously correct fixes explode several times in my programming life.
cheers,
m
On 05/04/2010 02:14 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
This involved doing another build of the package, which could involve changes in the buildroot and anomalies in the build process. Ask DaveJ some time about what happened to his kernel builds when the build host did a clock adjustment during the build. Shit happens, and making assumptions that just because the build completed that nothing went wrong is a great way to make a fool of yourself.
Some risks are so low that they're basically negligible.
Sure, but if the chance of any given thing going wrong - i.e. doing a build that successfully produces a package that doesn't do what you meant for it to - is .005, and there are 20 of those things which are serious enough to be a problem, that's a 10% chance of a major problem. (to say nothing of the myriad of things that can cause minor problems.)
If the 2 options are keeping an existing regression (which missed testing) in updates for a few more days or risking the off chance that there MAY be another regression with a probability of 1 in a million or something in that order of magnitude, I'll take the risk any day! If that kind of risk is too high for you, I hope you don't ever use a car, it might crash, you know?
It's nice that you'll take the risk, but it sure would be nice to shield the *users* of our software from this irrational bravado.
On 05/04/2010 01:40 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Peter Jones wrote:
I'm sorry you don't like it, but you've had ample occasion to come up with a better idea, and you have roundly refused to make any attempt at doing so.
"I'm sorry you don't like my plate of Merde Provençale, but you've had ample occation to come up with a better recipe for feces, and you have roundly refused to make any attempt at doing so."
See the problem there? (Hint: the basic assumption that you want to eat sh*t in the first place!)
That's a nice analogy; both vulgar and vacuous. Entirely inapt, but clever.
You were only interested in "better ideas" under a very narrow initial assumption which I don't share. Of course I was not interested in trying to coming up with "better ideas" under those conditions, as I don't believe that to be possible in the first place. You did not give any consideration to the fact that your initial premises may be broken and incorrect (which they happen to be).
The initial premise was that we've released several updates that turned out to introduce major bugs. I know you don't agree with that, since you've repeatedly discounted that premise in FESCo meetings and even in this thread, but that doesn't make it not the case.
You keep saying that, and it just shows a complete disregard for testing in general. Asking people to test it and simply flag that they've done so with success (or not) is very much not bureaucracy.
I don't believe testing to be the answer to everything. It's far from infallible, it's also not the only possible form of QA.
Sure, but you're (repeatedly) asserting, essentially, that it can't fix anything and that requiring testing is of no merit because <handwave about double checking your own work>.
There are changes which don't need testing, for example if a patch was dropped because we thought it wasn't needed anymore, and it turns out the patch is still needed, readding the patch needs no testing whatsoever because the patch has ALREADY been tested, plus it's fixing a regression.
Don't you realize that the testing also helps test procedural and typographical errors? For instance the case (which I've certainly done before) where a maintainer accidentally adds a Patch: line without a %patch line? This is part of the very scenario which you claim doesn't need testing. My experience is that it clearly does, because it's simple, it's easy to do, and it's trivial to get it right - and I screw it up sometimes.
This is why the latest qt update went out straight to stable. And no, testing did NOT catch the regression. Right after the update went stable, we got the report. You have to accept that most users will NOT try out a package until after it hits stable.
Nobody is saying that it's a panacea. We're saying that testing can catch things that not testing won't, and that these are important things with substantial consequences. We're not saying it'll catch everything, though every counterpoint you come up with does seem to presume that we are saying that.
We trust their intent and their ability, because that's reasonable. We don't trust that they never make mistakes, because that's insane. We all make mistakes. The karma system is an attempt to mitigate the damage when that (very frequent) eventuality occurs.
You need to prove that "very frequent" assertion. I don't see this as being true at all, quite the opposite. It almost never happens with the current system.
You had this discussion during the FESCo meeting on the 23rd of February, and several people provided counterexamples to your assertion that it doesn't happen often. It is regretful that you don't seem to have noticed.
Maintainers ALREADY use testing and keep feedback into account. Why do we need to FORCE them to? We should TRUST our maintainers!
The person claiming we don't trust our maintainers is you.
Honestly, I'm not really sure why we're still attempting to have a discussion with you about this, but letting your claims stand seems irresponsible to me.
On 05/04/2010 01:50 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
"Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
You must all realize that the ratio of bureaucracy/process burden and quality of maintainers/packagers go hand in hand. The better the maintainers/packagers/components are less bureaucracy/process burden is needed. The worse it gets more bureaucracy/process burden is needed. If ye all feel that the bureaucracy/process burden is increasing that only means that the quality of maintainers and their components is going down.. ( we might be getting more components inn in less quality ).
If our maintainers suck, bureaucracy is not a good solution to fix that problem.
But we already have a group of trusted maintainers, it's called "provenpackager". We could give provenpackagers the power to push directly to stable without any karma requirements.
Given the requirements FESCo + if they checks on the bugzilla activity of the individual that wants to become a provenpackager and take that into consideration when approving the request I dont see why not.
So basically it would be like this..
If you are a provenpackager you have the power to push directly to stable without any karma requirements however if you are not a provenpackager you will have to follow what ever procedure FESCo RELeng and QA come up with at any given time until you have been accepted as a provenpackager by FESCo.
Sounds like a draft to a solution everyone can agree with?
JBG
On 05/04/2010 05:55 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On 05/04/2010 01:50 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
"Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
You must all realize that the ratio of bureaucracy/process burden and quality of maintainers/packagers go hand in hand. The better the maintainers/packagers/components are less bureaucracy/process burden is needed. The worse it gets more bureaucracy/process burden is needed. If ye all feel that the bureaucracy/process burden is increasing that only means that the quality of maintainers and their components is going down.. ( we might be getting more components inn in less quality ).
If our maintainers suck, bureaucracy is not a good solution to fix that problem.
But we already have a group of trusted maintainers, it's called "provenpackager". We could give provenpackagers the power to push directly to stable without any karma requirements.
Given the requirements FESCo + if they checks on the bugzilla activity of the individual that wants to become a provenpackager and take that into consideration when approving the request I dont see why not.
So basically it would be like this..
If you are a provenpackager you have the power to push directly to stable without any karma requirements however if you are not a provenpackager you will have to follow what ever procedure FESCo RELeng and QA come up with at any given time until you have been accepted as a provenpackager by FESCo.
Sounds like a draft to a solution everyone can agree with?
No.
a) This would cause the "provenpackager" group to gradually start suffering from the same issues as the current "packager" group has ("lack of qualification"). It would degrade the "provenpackager" group.
b) Members of the current "packager" group should be qualified enough to judge if their update/upgrade needs an "immediate push". It they aren't able to do so, they should reconsider if they are qualified to be a packager at all.
Ralf
On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 02:00:59PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 18:45 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
here will ALWAYS be a need for a way to fasttrack regression fixes!
The proposals I've seen include a way to fasttrack. That is you get the required karma between the time the update was submitted to bodhi, and the time a bodhi admin starts the push. In such cases your update would go directly to stable. How is that not a fast track?
The Bodhi "karma" system is a very inflexible tool.
Firstly, getting 3 up votes is (probably) easy if you have loads of users like the kernel, and really hard for the rest of us with packages which have only a small number of users. When I have conscientiously tested the package myself on several machines, my vote doesn't count at all.
Secondly, a simple linear scale doesn't reflect the complexity of testing packages. I've had people downvote my packages because of FAQ issues or user error or long-standing bugs in some other package that we can't or don't want to fix; and people downvote packages because of serious issues that really deserve a BZ as well or instead.
There are also technical problems: You can't fit much text in the Bodhi text box, and it can't be formatted except as a single paragraph, and when you do add a comment to help someone it doesn't seem to be seen by the original downvoter.
Rich.
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 12:51, Richard W.M. Jones rjones@redhat.com wrote:
Secondly, a simple linear scale doesn't reflect the complexity of testing packages. I've had people downvote my packages because of FAQ issues or user error or long-standing bugs in some other package that we can't or don't want to fix; and people downvote packages because of serious issues that really deserve a BZ as well or instead.
That's being worked on, based on the proposals by Doug Ledford and Adam Williamson.
There are also technical problems: You can't fit much text in the Bodhi text box, and it can't be formatted except as a single paragraph,
https://fedorahosted.org/bodhi/newticket
Bodhi is using Markdown to format the update notes, it shouldn't be too hard to format the comments as well.
and when you do add a comment to help someone it doesn't seem to be seen by the original downvoter.
---------- Mathieu Bridon
On Tue, 4 May 2010 11:51:11 +0100, Richard wrote:
There are also technical problems: You can't fit much text in the Bodhi text box, and it can't be formatted except as a single paragraph, and when you do add a comment to help someone it doesn't seem to be seen by the original downvoter.
Provided that the original downvoter entered a valid email address or used a Fedora Account, subsequently added comments are forwarded to the original downvoter and all previous voters/commenters. Some voters use invalid addresses however, and others apparently don't read every incoming mail from bodhi.
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 14:01 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
[1] And I appreciate that I made a mistake with hal-storage in this cycle that caused inconvenience for people maintaining other spins, so I'm not going to claim any kind of perfection in this area
Which just adds reason to why we are doing necessary karma and automated testing, because humans make mistakes, no matter how much fun or not fun they are having.
Jesse Keating wrote:
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 14:01 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
[1] And I appreciate that I made a mistake with hal-storage in this cycle that caused inconvenience for people maintaining other spins, so I'm not going to claim any kind of perfection in this area
Which just adds reason to why we are doing necessary karma and automated testing, because humans make mistakes, no matter how much fun or not fun they are having.
Except karma requirements (which were in force due to the critical path process) did NOT prevent this particular regression, nor would a "1 week minimum in testing" requirement have prevented it (the update spent 8 days in testing). That process DOES NOT WORK. It just adds extra bureaucracy and delays the fix for the regression. (But thankfully, direct stable pushes are still possible for KDE packages, which allowed us to do one to fix this regression quickly.)
Kevin Kofler
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 18:51 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Except karma requirements (which were in force due to the critical path process) did NOT prevent this particular regression, nor would a "1 week minimum in testing" requirement have prevented it (the update spent 8 days in testing). That process DOES NOT WORK. It just adds extra bureaucracy and delays the fix for the regression. (But thankfully, direct stable pushes are still possible for KDE packages, which allowed us to do one to fix this regression quickly.)
You are definitely missing the forest for the trees here. In the proposals I've seen, the was no mandate that an update spend a week in testing, provided it got enough karma before that. If the issue at hand is so egregious to need a push ASAP, then there should be plenty of people on hand to snag the update from koji and provide you the necessary karma nearly immediately.
On 05/03/2010 11:12 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 18:51 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Except karma requirements (which were in force due to the critical path process) did NOT prevent this particular regression, nor would a "1 week minimum in testing" requirement have prevented it (the update spent 8 days in testing). That process DOES NOT WORK. It just adds extra bureaucracy and delays the fix for the regression. (But thankfully, direct stable pushes are still possible for KDE packages, which allowed us to do one to fix this regression quickly.)
You are definitely missing the forest for the trees here.
So do you: The karma stuff will never work and if then only in corner-cases.
In probably the overwhelming majority of cases, all karma does is adding to Fedora's bureaucracy, without being actually functional.
In the proposals I've seen, the was no mandate that an update spend a week in testing, provided it got enough karma before that. If the issue at hand is so egregious to need a push ASAP, then there should be plenty of people on hand to snag the update from koji and provide you the necessary karma nearly immediately.
You are presuming a bug * affects many people * is reproducable by many people * has "user visible" impacts * users are volunteering to provide feedback
These presumptions are all wrong and do not apply.
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 05:01 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
You are presuming a bug
- affects many people
- is reproducable by many people
- has "user visible" impacts
- users are volunteering to provide feedback
These presumptions are all wrong and do not apply.
In many cases these do apply. I participate in cases such as this nearly every day, and it's working. We're testing fixes, rejecting bad ones, and getting the right builds into stable. The system is working, but as we all know, no system is perfect. However perfect is the enemy of good. We can't take the position of "karma isn't the perfect solution to every update, therefor we should do away with testing all together".
Jesse Keating wrote:
In many cases these do apply. I participate in cases such as this nearly every day, and it's working. We're testing fixes, rejecting bad ones, and getting the right builds into stable. The system is working, but as we all know, no system is perfect. However perfect is the enemy of good. We can't take the position of "karma isn't the perfect solution to every update, therefor we should do away with testing all together".
You're attacking a strawman!!!
I never said "we should do away with testing all together"! Please, all of you, STOP putting these words into my mouth! (You're not the first one to do it, just look elsewhere in this thread, and in earlier threads, for evidence.)
I am saying that SOME updates can be pushed with less or even no testing. This does NOT mean that testing should not be used in most cases. It just means that it should be the maintainer's discretion whether to use it or not. The maintainer knows best how to handle his/her package. A dumb tool automatically enforcing some generic rules which are the same for all packages does not. And distinguishing 2 classes of packages (critical and non-critical) out of our thousands of packages doesn't change this in the least.
Kevin Kofler
Kevin Kofler wrote:
I am saying that SOME updates can be pushed with less or even no testing. This does NOT mean that testing should not be used in most cases. It just means that it should be the maintainer's discretion whether to use it or not. The maintainer knows best how to handle his/her package. A dumb tool automatically enforcing some generic rules which are the same for all packages does not. And distinguishing 2 classes of packages (critical and non-critical) out of our thousands of packages doesn't change this in the least.
Fedora security updates are regularly given no testing and are pushed directly to stable. Perhaps you should classify your updates with a severity of security.
Why should you abuse the system? Because the system is abusing you.
While I (and Kevin!) agree that testing is useful, as I became more involved after the dbus debacle, the freedom of packagers to handle their packages freely should be maintained. The recent upswing in policies and requirements is clouding Fedora's vision.
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 10:00 -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
The recent upswing in policies and requirements is clouding Fedora's vision.
Which vision is that? The one where we should produce a generally usable stable operating system every 6 months, one that users can confidently use throughout the life of that release? Making sure our updates given to users are better tested seems to be working toward that vision, not away from it.
Jesse Keating wrote:
Which vision is that? The one where we should produce a generally usable stable operating system every 6 months, one that users can confidently use throughout the life of that release? Making sure our updates given to users are better tested seems to be working toward that vision, not away from it.
I was debating on whether I needed to clarify my last sentence and it looks like I need to. I really hoped I didn't have to quote you, of all people, Fedora's Foundation[1]. Friends, Features, and First being the most important ones here.
Fedora Rawhide/Fedora N+1 Yes, these need rigorous testing and QA. Policies and tests are being set in place that will make a better and brighter Fedora future. However, it seems that the same release-level criteria are eroding down to stable updates.
Fedora N Testing is nice, but mandatory on all updates? Before you point at me claiming I wish to destroy Fedora with bad updates, lets re-hash everything that has been hashed out the past few months. If someone puts out a "bad" update, they should be allowed to correct their mistake as soon as possible - karma or not. Time, nor testing, can catch everything. This must be accepted.
Fedora N-1 It seems there is an unwritten rule that this release level only receives bug-fixes only, especially right before EOL. Testing of these packages is extremely minimal because most QA folk have moved on to N or even N+1. Are bug fixes going to be missing after EOL due to inadequate testing to meet the stringent requirements you wish to set?
Fedora's contributors, myself included, are not at a level where we can provide simultaneous testing of all Fedora releases (including rawhide) for all packages. Requiring all Fedora releases to sit under one QA doctrine is asinine. You want suggestions? There need to be multi-level policies. No two Fedora versions are the same, so why should updates all be subject to the same policies?
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 11:25 -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
Fedora Rawhide/Fedora N+1 Yes, these need rigorous testing and QA. Policies and tests are being set in place that will make a better and brighter Fedora future. However, it seems that the same release-level criteria are eroding down to stable updates.
Fedora N Testing is nice, but mandatory on all updates? Before you point at me claiming I wish to destroy Fedora with bad updates, lets re-hash everything that has been hashed out the past few months. If someone puts out a "bad" update, they should be allowed to correct their mistake as soon as possible - karma or not. Time, nor testing, can catch everything. This must be accepted.
Fedora N-1 It seems there is an unwritten rule that this release level only receives bug-fixes only, especially right before EOL. Testing of these packages is extremely minimal because most QA folk have moved on to N or even N+1. Are bug fixes going to be missing after EOL due to inadequate testing to meet the stringent requirements you wish to set?
Fedora's contributors, myself included, are not at a level where we can provide simultaneous testing of all Fedora releases (including rawhide) for all packages. Requiring all Fedora releases to sit under one QA doctrine is asinine. You want suggestions? There need to be multi-level policies. No two Fedora versions are the same, so why should updates all be subject to the same policies?
So this is kind of funny. You'd rather see testing become /less/ rigorous as the age of a release grows, and you want the most rigorous testing done in rawhide. That's quite the opposite of what many of us are trying to work toward, that is as the release moves from rawhide into branched into released into released-1 the testing gets harder, and the chance of breakage gets lower. Users of older releases aren't there for the fun of it, they need to get real work done, and don't want updates to get in their way of accomplishing that. We should be more careful with our older release than anything else.
So I'd love to have multi-level policy, but in my opinion it should get harder and harder to push an update as the release gets older, not easier.
Jesse Keating wrote:
So this is kind of funny. You'd rather see testing become/less/ rigorous as the age of a release grows, and you want the most rigorous testing done in rawhide. That's quite the opposite of what many of us are trying to work toward, that is as the release moves from rawhide into branched into released into released-1 the testing gets harder, and the chance of breakage gets lower. Users of older releases aren't there for the fun of it, they need to get real work done, and don't want updates to get in their way of accomplishing that. We should be more careful with our older release than anything else.
No, I was stating fact - not opinion. Older releases receive less testing. Bodhi metrics show it if you want something tangible besides my words.
So I'd love to have multi-level policy, but in my opinion it should get harder and harder to push an update as the release gets older, not easier.
We can't rely on one tester to be able to test older releases through a stringent policy, can we?
It's common sense that older releases should be receiving more testing, but here in reality it is the opposite. If I am wrong, please prove it.
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 12:04 -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
So this is kind of funny. You'd rather see testing become/less/ rigorous as the age of a release grows, and you want the most rigorous testing done in rawhide. That's quite the opposite of what many of us are trying to work toward, that is as the release moves from rawhide into branched into released into released-1 the testing gets harder, and the chance of breakage gets lower. Users of older releases aren't there for the fun of it, they need to get real work done, and don't want updates to get in their way of accomplishing that. We should be more careful with our older release than anything else.
No, I was stating fact - not opinion. Older releases receive less testing. Bodhi metrics show it if you want something tangible besides my words.
Current bodhi metrics cannot be used as a judge. Currently karma is not required, so the path of least resistance is to not provide it. If/when karma is required for an update to go out, or a timeout in -testing, we will see an uptick in karma. We've seen that in branched, we will likely see it in released Fedora's too. How much, and in which release remains to be seen.
So I'd love to have multi-level policy, but in my opinion it should get harder and harder to push an update as the release gets older, not easier.
We can't rely on one tester to be able to test older releases through a stringent policy, can we?
It's common sense that older releases should be receiving more testing, but here in reality it is the opposite. If I am wrong, please prove it.
The point of the updates policy is to change reality, not to draft policy around an existing reality. The reality is that updates are going out untested to stable releases and causing real problems to real users. We'd like to change that reality.
Jesse Keating wrote:
If/when karma is required for an update to go out, or a timeout in -testing, we will see an uptick in karma.
You keep claiming that. You have no evidence whatsoever for that, and it doesn't seem plausible to me at all. Users only care about having the issue fixed for themselves, if they bother fetching the package from testing or Koji at all, the problem will be solved for them, so why would they care about whether the fixed package will go to stable?
We've seen that in branched, we will likely see it in released Fedora's too.
The userbase of branched is very different from the one of stable releases. People who use branched tend to be voluntary testers who know that they're using an unfinished released and expected to provide testing. On the other hand, the average user of a release is NOT a tester and will NOT sign up to test things for the benefit of other users.
So I don't see the results for branched as evidence for your claim at all.
In addition, the new update policy wants to require karma (or a 1 week timeout) even for non-critical packages. We have NO evidence regarding those from branched as the karma requirements were only for critical path packages.
And finally, even if you're right, you still have no evidence that the karma was given out based on actual testing and not merely on a plea of "please +1 my package".
The point of the updates policy is to change reality
LOL!!! Good luck!
The reality is that updates are going out untested to stable releases and causing real problems to real users.
And your evidence is?
The "evidence" given in FESCo meetings was just two isolated incidents, the first of which was a security (!) update and clearly a one-time issue, the second in a package (bind) which is not installed by default and which the vast majority of Fedora users don't have installed at all. Those are just 2 (!) incidents over YEARS of Fedora's history. So I don't see this as a problem needing to be solved at all.
Kevin Kofler
Michael Cronenworth wrote:
It's common sense that older releases should be receiving more testing, but here in reality it is the opposite. If I am wrong, please prove it.
Indeed, that's the fact we have to deal with, and IMHO the solution is to push the same changes to all releases wherever possible and to consider them as one change for the purpose of testing, i.e. testing on any release should count for all of them. Of course, this is only an approximation, but it's an extremely good one, and testing can never be flawless anyway.
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Jesse Keating jkeating@redhat.com wrote:
So I'd love to have multi-level policy, but in my opinion it should get harder and harder to push an update as the release gets older, not easier.
In general I'm in agreement with this. But at the same time I'm concerned that the policy is going to make it more difficult for me to respond to breakage in my packages created when a maintainer does an update (mistakenly) that one of my packages depend on.
Not to harp on any of my peers...so apologizes if to anyone I think I'm picking on in the following case study.
I just went through a round of breakage associated with matplotlib and numpy caused by other maintainer action in both rawhide and EPEL. In rawhide it was really easy for me to get fixes out. For EPEL, because of the update policy..it was harder for me...the maintainer who is trying to react to brokenness created by another maintainer.
The thing I really need help with as a maintainer is help seeing when a update in testing is a potential impactor for one of the packages I maintain. So I can get ahead of any problems and do the testing I need to do against the update in updates-testing and keep it from hitting stable until I can spin up versions of my packages that work with the update. I don't want to be in a position where I have to react to breakage. I want to be proactive, but I really need a better heads up as to when things that impact my packages are in the que for stable so I can better prioritize my time.
-jef
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 09:07 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Jesse Keating jkeating@redhat.com wrote:
So I'd love to have multi-level policy, but in my opinion it should get harder and harder to push an update as the release gets older, not easier.
In general I'm in agreement with this. But at the same time I'm concerned that the policy is going to make it more difficult for me to respond to breakage in my packages created when a maintainer does an update (mistakenly) that one of my packages depend on.
Not to harp on any of my peers...so apologizes if to anyone I think I'm picking on in the following case study.
I just went through a round of breakage associated with matplotlib and numpy caused by other maintainer action in both rawhide and EPEL. In rawhide it was really easy for me to get fixes out. For EPEL, because of the update policy..it was harder for me...the maintainer who is trying to react to brokenness created by another maintainer.
The thing I really need help with as a maintainer is help seeing when a update in testing is a potential impactor for one of the packages I maintain. So I can get ahead of any problems and do the testing I need to do against the update in updates-testing and keep it from hitting stable until I can spin up versions of my packages that work with the update. I don't want to be in a position where I have to react to breakage. I want to be proactive, but I really need a better heads up as to when things that impact my packages are in the que for stable so I can better prioritize my time.
-jef
If the breakage was in the form of broken deps, the original update would not have been allowed out in the first place. The maintainer would have had to contact all the folks with packages that would break and get them to coordinate the update.
If the breakage was more of a functional break and not a dep break, that's where automated testing comes in, and we grow the automated functional testing of updates so that if an update comes along we can detect the breakage and alert both parties.
The solution to "shit went out and broke my stuff" isn't to make it easier to put shit out, it's to make it harder to put /broken/ shit out in the first place.
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 9:50 AM, Jesse Keating jkeating@redhat.com wrote:
If the breakage was more of a functional break and not a dep break, that's where automated testing comes in, and we grow the automated functional testing of updates so that if an update comes along we can detect the breakage and alert both parties.
Yes in this case it was functional breakage.
The solution to "shit went out and broke my stuff" isn't to make it easier to put shit out, it's to make it harder to put /broken/ shit out in the first place.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm saying that to really to take advantage of the policy as a maintainer and derive the most benefit from the requirement that things sit in testing awaiting karma..I need some help getting a heads up when things I need to be aware of hit the testing repository so I can do my part and get ahead of potential functional breakage...and even write test cases for it.
-jef
Jesse Keating wrote:
The solution to "shit went out and broke my stuff" isn't to make it easier to put shit out, it's to make it harder to put broken shit out in the first place.
Sure, that's a nice theory, but in practice, no matter how much testing you require, there will ALWAYS be regressions slipping through and needing fast response.
Kevin Kofler
Michael Cronenworth wrote:
Fedora security updates are regularly given no testing and are pushed directly to stable. Perhaps you should classify your updates with a severity of security.
That doesn't work because security updates require security team approval (another silly policy which was enforced despite almost everybody on the devel list having been against it, only the security team itself wanted it) and the security team will reject updates which are not actually security updates. (They want to see a specific CVE and even reject updates which fix potential security holes, asking them to be changed to regular bugfix updates instead, unless you can show evidence for a concrete security hole. For example, they had me change a qimageblitz update which fixed qimageblitz requiring an executable stack on x86_64 from security to bugfix.)
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 05:01 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
On 05/03/2010 11:12 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 18:51 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Except karma requirements (which were in force due to the critical path process) did NOT prevent this particular regression, nor would a "1 week minimum in testing" requirement have prevented it (the update spent 8 days in testing). That process DOES NOT WORK. It just adds extra bureaucracy and delays the fix for the regression. (But thankfully, direct stable pushes are still possible for KDE packages, which allowed us to do one to fix this regression quickly.)
You are definitely missing the forest for the trees here.
So do you: The karma stuff will never work and if then only in corner-cases.
In probably the overwhelming majority of cases, all karma does is adding to Fedora's bureaucracy, without being actually functional.
In the proposals I've seen, the was no mandate that an update spend a week in testing, provided it got enough karma before that. If the issue at hand is so egregious to need a push ASAP, then there should be plenty of people on hand to snag the update from koji and provide you the necessary karma nearly immediately.
You are presuming a bug
- affects many people
- is reproducable by many people
- has "user visible" impacts
- users are volunteering to provide feedback
So it its none of these why do you want to fast track it into stable?
Leave it updates-testing for 2-3 weeks and pull it in then if nobody complains.
If you can't find anyone the bug affects I don't see why its an urgent must-fix.
Dave.
On 05/04/2010 05:09 AM, Dave Airlie wrote:
So it its none of these why do you want to fast track it into stable?
The fact nobody has reported a bug into Fedora's bugtracking system doesn't mean a package is not bugged or doesn't suffer from defects.
The prototypical situations I am facing with my packages is * upstreams releasing bug-fixes to bugs they have collected and I haven't heared nor noticed before. * individuals reporting bugs through bugzilla and me trying to find a fix ASAP.
Leave it updates-testing for 2-3 weeks and pull it in then if nobody complains.
That's what I have been doing and is one of the context in which I consider karma to be superflous bureaucracy.
Also, when reporters are struggling with an actual bug, they typically join in bugzilla and provide feedback through it. In such cases, karma also is superflous bureaucracy.
The only case I'd see some sense for karma would be "feature upgrades". A case which in Fedora is supposed to happen in rawhide.
If you can't find anyone the bug affects I don't see why its an urgent must-fix.
c.f. above - not all bugs are "highly user visible".
This doesn't mean these bugs are not present in Fedora nor does this mean they do not affect Fedora users.
Conversely, things like memory leaks, potential security leaks or libraries mal-processing something, often get away unnoticed and actually are much more serious than a single application dumping core immediately.
Fixes to these kind of issues often are the cause for situations users typically describe as "something started to work magically" with nobody recalling actually having address it.
Ralf
On 05/03/2010 12:51 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 14:01 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
[1] And I appreciate that I made a mistake with hal-storage in this cycle that caused inconvenience for people maintaining other spins, so I'm not going to claim any kind of perfection in this area
Which just adds reason to why we are doing necessary karma and automated testing, because humans make mistakes, no matter how much fun or not fun they are having.
Except karma requirements (which were in force due to the critical path process) did NOT prevent this particular regression, nor would a "1 week minimum in testing" requirement have prevented it (the update spent 8 days in testing). That process DOES NOT WORK. It just adds extra bureaucracy and delays the fix for the regression. (But thankfully, direct stable pushes are still possible for KDE packages, which allowed us to do one to fix this regression quickly.)
Wait just a second - you're arguing that requiring testing doesn't work because nobody tested the KDE spin within 8 days. You might want to rethink this position.
Peter Jones wrote:
Wait just a second - you're arguing that requiring testing doesn't work because nobody tested the KDE spin within 8 days. You might want to rethink this position.
Why? I don't see the contradiction. If nobody tests things, testing doesn't and can't work.
Kevin Kofler
On 05/04/2010 06:04 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Peter Jones wrote:
Wait just a second - you're arguing that requiring testing doesn't work because nobody tested the KDE spin within 8 days. You might want to rethink this position.
Why? I don't see the contradiction. If nobody tests things, testing doesn't and can't work.
Well my logic tells me that if nobody test things it more implies that there is no demand for the product that did not receive that testing not that the testing process was or is flawed in one way or another.
JBG
On Tue, 04 May 2010 20:04:45 +0200 Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Peter Jones wrote:
Wait just a second - you're arguing that requiring testing doesn't work because nobody tested the KDE spin within 8 days. You might want to rethink this position.
Why? I don't see the contradiction. If nobody tests things, testing doesn't and can't work.
More likely explanations include, but are not limited to:
- the fixed package wasn't seriously broken, nobody knew about the fix - the fixed package isn't used - the fixed package users have given up using it - testing people asleep on the job
Bernd
Sir Gallantmon (ニール・ゴンパ) wrote:
Though, there are some instances where the prevailing opinion should be ignored, when there is no solid evidence to back it up, e.g. Mono and the like.
Indeed, I also think defending freedom is important (and it was part of my campaign). But I've also been unhappy with FESCo's decisions in that domain, e.g.: * libvdpau was approved for Fedora. This is a library which: - only accelerates decoding patent-encumbered MPEG family video codecs. ALL software which uses that is in RPM Fusion, not Fedora, anyway. - has no actual Free Software implementations. It is ONLY implemented by proprietary drivers. So what does Fedora have to gain from this pseudo-Free library? * in at least 2 occasions, so-called "Open Core" [1] crippleware has been not only approved for Fedora (which makes sense, as IMHO we should accept everything under a Free license and with no patent issues as a Fedora package), but advertised as a Fedora Feature, which I consider to be completely counterproductive, as it gives free press coverage to such crippleware and sends a message to companies that releasing some crippled shareware version under a Free Software license is enough to get your product advertised as Free or "Open Source" all over the planet. My complaints about giving free advertising to such crippleware have been entirely ignored.
[1] http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware.html
Kevin Kofler
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 1:04 AM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Sir Gallantmon (ニール・ゴンパ) wrote:
Though, there are some instances where the prevailing opinion should be ignored, when there is no solid evidence to back it up, e.g. Mono and the like.
Indeed, I also think defending freedom is important (and it was part of my campaign). But I've also been unhappy with FESCo's decisions in that domain, e.g.:
- libvdpau was approved for Fedora. This is a library which:
- only accelerates decoding patent-encumbered MPEG family video codecs. ALL software which uses that is in RPM Fusion, not Fedora, anyway.
- has no actual Free Software implementations. It is ONLY implemented by proprietary drivers.
So what does Fedora have to gain from this pseudo-Free library?
- in at least 2 occasions, so-called "Open Core" [1] crippleware has been
not only approved for Fedora (which makes sense, as IMHO we should accept everything under a Free license and with no patent issues as a Fedora package), but advertised as a Fedora Feature, which I consider to be completely counterproductive, as it gives free press coverage to such crippleware and sends a message to companies that releasing some crippled shareware version under a Free Software license is enough to get your product advertised as Free or "Open Source" all over the planet. My complaints about giving free advertising to such crippleware have been entirely ignored.
[1] http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/10/16/open-core-shareware.html
Kevin Kofler
Wait, I thought libvdpau had a VA-API backend? And I thought Fedora included a crippled version of mplayer in its repositories? Either way, it is true that VDPAU currently only works with MPEG formats, but nothing says that the library can't be modified to support other formats, does it?
If I'm wrong, then shouldn't it be RPM Fusion?
Sir Gallantmon (ニール・ゴンパ) wrote:
Wait, I thought libvdpau had a VA-API backend?
AFAIK, no, there's only the opposite (a VDPAU backend for VA-API).
And VA-API also has no implementation in Free drivers other than a proof of concept for the intel driver which: * only supports MPEG 2, no MPEG 4, * is not a true hardware implementation, but implemented as shaders, and thus subject to software patents, which makes it unshippable in Fedora.
And I thought Fedora included a crippled version of mplayer in its repositories?
We actually don't.
Either way, it is true that VDPAU currently only works with MPEG formats, but nothing says that the library can't be modified to support other formats, does it?
AFAIK, all of the primitives supported are operations which are used only in MPEG (most of them patented). Acceleration for Theora would have to be done with a completely different API, and probably exclusively based on shaders as no existing graphics card has a dedicated video unit with Theora support. So the best way to accelerate Theora is probably to ignore those APIs entirely and work directly with OpenGL shaders. Those APIs are focused on what GPU video units do in hardware and that's just MPEG.
If I'm wrong, then shouldn't it be RPM Fusion?
That's my point!
Kevin Kofler
On Monday 03 May 2010 02:20:51 Kevin Kofler wrote:
Hi,
You will have noticed by now that my FESCo term is about to expire, that the nomination period for FESCo just closed and that my name does not show up on the list of candidates. No, this is not an accident or negligence, the decision not to run for another term was intentional, for several reasons:
- When I ran for election a year ago, one of my reasons for running, and
also something I made part of my campaign, was that it shouldn't always be the same people who are sitting on FESCo. We have a much higher number of active contributors than FESCo seats, so it makes sense to see some turnover happening. So it would be very hypocritical from me to attempt to sit another year on FESCo myself, now that I'm myself a FESCo "veteran".
- I have never been a committee person and have always hated sitting on meetings. I have done it anyway for a year because I believed it to be important for the good of the project. But I'm really fed up of those
meetings (I'm feeling burned out) and prefer focusing on more practical, less political areas of Fedora. The fact that I don't feel my presence in those meetings being of much if any use (more on that later) doesn't help either.
- When looking back at what happened over the year I've been in office, I
have a feeling that I have been able to acheive basically nothing:
- The vast majority of votes were either unanimous or 8-1 against me. In
both cases, my vote was entirely redundant. Even for more contested votes, my vote hardly ever mattered.
- Any attempts to discuss those issues where everyone was against me went nowhere. In most cases, people rushed out a vote without even
considering the real issue at hand and then shot down any discussion with "we already voted, we want to move on". In those few cases where there actually was a discussion, my position was always dismissed as being ridiculous and not even worth considering, my arguments, no matter how strong, were entirely ignored.
- Basically any proposal I filed was systematically shot down. Even
things which should be obvious such as: . calling GNOME by its name rather than the generic "Desktop" or . eliminating the useless bureaucratic red tape of FESCo ratification for FPC guidelines which just wastes everyone's time and constitutes pure process inefficiency got only incomprehension. I have come to the conclusion that it is just plain impossible for a single person to change FESCo's ways and that therefore I am just wasting my time there.
- I am very unhappy about FESCo's recent (and not so recent, which were
what made me run in the first place) directions. The trend is steady towards bureaucracy and centralization:
- Maintainers are continuously being distrusted. It all started with the provenpackager policy, where every single provenpackager has to be
voted in by a FESCo majority vote, as opposed to letting any sponsor approve people as provenpackagers as originally planned, or just opening all our packages to everyone as was the case in the old Extras. From there, things pretty much degenerated and we're now at a point where FESCo no longer trusts maintainers to know when an update to the packages they maintain is stable, instead insisting on automatically-enforced bureaucracy which will never be as reliable and effective as a human. The fact that we trust our maintainers used to be one of the core values of the Fedora community. It has been replaced by control-freakiness and paranoia.
- All the power in Fedora is being centralized into 2 major committees:
the Board and FESCo. FESCo is responsible for a lot of things all taking up meeting time, leading to lengthy meetings and little time for discussion. Many of those things could be handled better in a more decentralized way. Power should be delegated to SIGs and technical committees wherever possible, FESCo should only handle issues where no reponsible subcommittee can be found or where there is disagreement among affected committees. In particular, I suggest that: . FPC guidelines should be passed directly by FPC, only concrete objections should get escalated to FESCo. . membership in packager-sponsors and provenpackager should be handled by the sponsors, with a process to be defined by them (my suggestion: provenpackager should take 1 sponsor to approve and no possibility to object or veto, sponsor should take 3 sponsors to approve and objections can be escalated to FESCo). . features should get approved by the responsible SIG or committee (e.g. FPC for RPM features, KDE SIG for KDE features etc.). The feature wrangler should decide on a SIG to hand the feature to for approval, or even accept features filed directly into "approved" by the responsible SIG, and FESCo would be responsible only where there is no clearly responsible SIG, or to arbitrate when a SIG is trying to make a change which affects other SIGs without their consent. Unfortunately, these suggestions are falling on deaf ears, in fact I filed the first suggestion as an official proposal (as it looked very obvious to me, the ratification process is pure bureaucracy) and it was shot down (also due to the FPC chair claiming FPC doesn't want this, despite at least 2 FPC members having spoken out rather favorably). I think a more decentralized approach (in general, not just for FPC guidelines) would be more efficient, more democratic, less bureaucratic and less corporate and would increase overall maintainer happiness by reducing the impression of the "diktat from above".
- The prevailing opinion of the electorate of Fedora contributors keeps getting ignored. Feedback on the Fedora devel mailing list is never
seen as in any way binding, it's often dismissed as noise or "trolling". The predominant opinion in FESCo is "you voted for us, now we get to do whatever we want", which is flawed in many ways: . It assumes there were true alternatives to vote for instead. This assumption does not look true to me. . It assumes the voters were aware of the positions of all the candidates. I'm fairly sure this was not the case. While I appreciate what has been done in an attempt to solve this issue (questionnaire, townhalls), this has proven by far insufficient to build an opinion on the candidates. I think there's a reason representative democracies normally work with parties/factions and I think something like that might help a lot, depending on what kind of factions would show up. . It assumes representative democracy is a well-working model in the first place, especially in its most hardcore form ("now we get to do whatever we want"). I believe elected representatives should really REPRESENT the people who voted them. I realize politicians aren't doing that, but are they really a good model to follow? I believe listening more to the feedback on the devel ML and taking it into account during decision-making would reduce frustration with FESCo a lot. - The prevailing opinion of Fedora users keeps getting ignored. See e.g. Adam Williamson's poll about the kind of updates users expect from Fedora, its clearcut majoritarian result, and FESCo and the Board both planning to do the exact opposite.
- Common sense is just generally lacking, see e.g. the decision that the
GNOME spin should continue being called "Desktop Spin", despite evidence that this is confusing many users, both the ones actively looking for GNOME and the ones who want some other desktop. And that's just one such nonsensical decision, the one I remember best because this is an issue I care much about. I do not wish to stand for such a committee anymore (in fact I probably should have resigned much earlier, as I've just been frustrated and burned out for more than half of the term, but I didn't because my feeling of responsibility was too strong) and, as pointed out before, I feel powerless to change anything.
Therefore, I will stay in office until the end of my term, but I will not be available for reelection. I would like to thank the people who voted for me last year for their support and apologize to those who would have liked to vote for me this time for not giving them this opportunity. If you would like a KDE SIG person in FESCo, vote for Steven M. Parrish (and vote for Rex Dieter for the Board). But if you want to see the kind of change to FESCo I'd like to see, it'll take a faction of at least 5 people to make it happen.
Kevin, thanks for your (Don Quixote's) work in FESCo! You had a lot of supporters here in the office! It's sad you don't want to fight windmills anymore but I understand your reasons.
Jaroslav
Kevin Kofler
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 02:20 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
But if you want to see the kind of change to FESCo I'd like to see, it'll take a faction of at least 5 people to make it happen.
Surely this is the point: if there are not sufficient candidates with a particular point of view, that's hardly FESCo's (or anyone else's) fault.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to talk about prevailing opinion of the mailing list otherwise; to me a lot of the discussion looks an awful lot like a vocal minority, and some of these issues (e.g., confusing the name of the Desktop spin with others) have been pretty much done to death and certainly aren't "obvious" to me.
Cheers
Alex.
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Alex Hudson wrote:
I think it's a bit disingenuous to talk about prevailing opinion of the mailing list otherwise; to me a lot of the discussion looks an awful lot like a vocal minority
I think it's quite cheap to write off the mailing list consensus as a "vocal minority" with no evidence for such a conclusion.
and some of these issues (e.g., confusing the name of the Desktop spin with others) have been pretty much done to death and certainly aren't "obvious" to me.
Why should we not call the GNOME spin, and the GNOME desktop in general, by its name? GNOME is just A desktop, it's NOT "the" desktop.
Kevin Kofler
On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 07:34:28PM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Why should we not call the GNOME spin, and the GNOME desktop in general, by its name? GNOME is just A desktop, it's NOT "the" desktop.
It's the desktop with the most development and integration work performed in the distribution, and hence it gets to be the default. This is, of course, unfair.
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 8:08 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 07:34:28PM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Why should we not call the GNOME spin, and the GNOME desktop in general, by its name? GNOME is just A desktop, it's NOT "the" desktop.
It's the desktop with the most development and integration work performed in the distribution, and hence it gets to be the default. This is, of course, unfair.
No, it's not unfair. That are just facts. And it can and should stay as the default as long as the GNOME desktop gets the most development and integration. It's just about "Desktop". It's the GNOME-Desktop, since there are more. If the GNOME guys like it or not, they are not alone ;)
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 19:34 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Alex Hudson wrote:
I think it's a bit disingenuous to talk about prevailing opinion of the mailing list otherwise; to me a lot of the discussion looks an awful lot like a vocal minority
I think it's quite cheap to write off the mailing list consensus as a "vocal minority" with no evidence for such a conclusion.
No, not really. Consensus of "the list" is not the same as consensus of the participants of a particular discussion - if anything, the evidence has to come the other way that a particular discussion does in any way reflect the balance of developer opinion.
I'm not saying that opinions on the list are worthless; quite the contrary. I just don't think it constitutes evidence one way or another as to the balance of opinion of the members of the list.
and some of these issues (e.g., confusing the name of the Desktop spin with others) have been pretty much done to death and certainly aren't "obvious" to me.
Why should we not call the GNOME spin, and the GNOME desktop in general, by its name?
This has been done to death, surely?
For one, I don't think applications should get chosen for the Desktop spin for being GNOME: e.g., I wouldn't choose Epiphany over Firefox, even though it's more lightweight, better integrated, etc. Prioritizing non-GNOME applications doesn't seem right for something you would label "GNOME spin".
Cheers
Alex.
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On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Alex Hudson fedora@alexhudson.com wrote:
I think it's a bit disingenuous to talk about prevailing opinion of the mailing list otherwise; to me a lot of the discussion looks an awful lot like a vocal minority,
Be careful about meeting subjective opinion with differing subjective opinion.
How many individuals vote in the FESCO election? How man individuals chime in on heated devel-list threads? When the voting population is itself a minority of a larger community its difficult to know what minority opinion is big enough to be representative of general thought. it could be argued that the voting record is itself another vocal minority opinion.
The general election format that FESCO uses does lend itself to exactly the sort of problems Kevin thinks he's seeing.. even in the brick and mortar world. There's no defined constituencies for any candidate..no topological separation of the voting demographic that helps you point to a specific member of the committee as your representative. It can lead to a sense of disconnectedness..even in the brick and mortar world...especially when there is a strong expectation of representative accountability.
But I think your entirely correct about an organized slate of candidates being the correct path to take to address the expressed general concern. This is typically how changes in direction in brick and mortar general election scenarios are carried forward. An organized slate of candidates with a stated agenda.
-jef
2010/5/3 Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at:
Hi,
You will have noticed by now that my FESCo term is about to expire, that the nomination period for FESCo just closed and that my name does not show up on the list of candidates. No, this is not an accident or negligence, the decision not to run for another term was intentional, for several reasons:
Hi Kevin, i really like your motivations for being part of the fesco, and voted and supported you even if i dont agree on many of your points. I have the impression many people feels the same frustration like me reading your open letter.
However, in your message you could have proposed something that would change the way fesco works, instead of returning on those issues which have been discussed, and voted, following the rules. I mean something like giving each seater the ability to throw a veto once, or discuss and vote issues on separate meetings, or any other different idea you could think of after your experience at the fesco.
Hi Kevin,
On 3 May 2010 01:20, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
You will have noticed by now that my FESCo term is about to expire, that the nomination period for FESCo just closed and that my name does not show up on the list of candidates. No, this is not an accident or negligence, the decision not to run for another term was intentional, for several reasons:
<snip>
I'm sorry to read this. Dissent is important and I for one believe that someone fighting for the causes you represented was important. As you have admitted, you are not a committee person so I hope you find greater satisfaction in your change of direction. Being an engineer will _always_ be more fun than being a bureaucrat.
Regards
Therefore, I will stay in office until the end of my term, but I will not be available for reelection. I would like to thank the people who voted for me last year for their support and apologize to those who would have liked to vote for me this time for not giving them this opportunity. If you would like a KDE SIG person in FESCo, vote for Steven M. Parrish (and vote for Rex Dieter for the Board). But if you want to see the kind of change to FESCo I'd like to see, it'll take a faction of at least 5 people to make it happen.
Kevin Kofler
-- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
I'm sorry to hear this as well. Fedora KDE has made great strides and is in my opinion the premiere KDE distro. Thanks for your work!
Kevin, one way you might help for this election is add some questions to the question that you think are important for voters to know about the candidate. So far only Paul and I have added questions, and I really think the community needs to be more involved here. As a reminder it's at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F14_elections_questionnaire
Kevin Kofler wrote:
I do not wish to stand for such a committee anymore
Kevin, thank you for your attempts and for raising attention on the difficulties you have faced.
If some of the time you save by not doing meetings will be spent on additional excellent technical contributions of yours, Fedora will actually gain something.
So, if your decision is both positive for you and positive for Fedora, there is nothing to be too sad about.
Respectfully,
I'm sorry you are unhappy.
I can only speak for myself here, but:
- I don't distrust our maintainers. I very much value the work they do and without them we would have no Fedora. However, I also want to help them do the right thing for our users (who I also would like to see happy). I'm open to ideas on how to reduce 'red tape' for them, while increasing the standard of packages for our users. I know you have many such ideas, but I don't agree that we should not have testing or help our maintainers find problems before our users get the package.
- I read this list every day, and am very mindful of feedback from developers. Any communication media is good, IMHO. My mailbox is also always open. I think many become discouraged with the mailing list these days because a few people reply to EVERY SINGLE POST with no new thoughts or information. Make a reasoned argument, wait and reply (at a high level) to feedback. Posting a reply to every post repeating yourself just makes less people able or interested in following the discussion.
- I would like to hope that we can look beyond ourselves. We shouldn't be looking at "My packages" or "My Desktop". We should all be working for a Fedora that we can be proud of our users using. We should be consistent about how much testing we do and when we update things so ALL our users will know whats going on.
Can we Improve things? I absolutely think so, but change takes time, well reasoned argument, and people willing to do the work to make it happen.
kevin
Kevin Fenzi wrote:
- I don't distrust our maintainers. I very much value the work they do and without them we would have no Fedora. However, I also want to help them do the right thing for our users (who I also would like to see happy). I'm open to ideas on how to reduce 'red tape' for them, while increasing the standard of packages for our users. I know you have many such ideas, but I don't agree that we should not have testing or help our maintainers find problems before our users get the package.
Helping our maintainers is one thing, FORCING them to work the way FESCo wants is another. And sadly, FESCo's update policy does the latter, NOT the former. "Helping" means ADVISING people, not REQUIRING them to follow some bureaucratic process. Update guidelines should be purely informative, not hardcoded in Bodhi as you, the other 8 FESCo members, decided (over my strong dissent).
And again, it is simply NOT TRUE that I'm arguing that "we should not have testing". I'm arguing that SOME updates should, at the maintainer's discretion, bypass testing because the urgency largely outweighs the risk (be it because the risk is extremely small, because the urgency is extremely high or both). The maintainer is in the best position to make such a call. I DO complain in the rare occasions where some update which breaks things is pushed directly to stable. But it means the maintainer screwed up and we need to teach the maintainer how to avoid such a mistake the next time, not to outright ban all direct stable pushes, many of which are legitimate. (In the cases I complained about, it was always quite obvious to me, and I believe to any sufficiently experienced maintainer, that the decision to push to stable was inappropriate, even without the hindsight.) But I ALSO complain when an urgent fix is NOT pushed to stable in a timely manner, sitting around in testing for no good reason.
- I read this list every day, and am very mindful of feedback from developers. Any communication media is good, IMHO. My mailbox is also always open. I think many become discouraged with the mailing list these days because a few people reply to EVERY SINGLE POST with no new thoughts or information. Make a reasoned argument, wait and reply (at a high level) to feedback. Posting a reply to every post repeating yourself just makes less people able or interested in following the discussion.
Then why did you not take such feedback into account when voting? Several people, including some very experienced high-profile packagers, objected to the new update policies. They have been ignored, by you and by the other 7 members.
- I would like to hope that we can look beyond ourselves. We
shouldn't be looking at "My packages" or "My Desktop". We should all be working for a Fedora that we can be proud of our users using. We should be consistent about how much testing we do and when we update things so ALL our users will know whats going on.
I'm sorry, but I don't agree with you at all about this kind of bureaucracy being the way to make our users happy. I strongly believe our maintainers are the ones who know best how to make their users happy, in particular, what to push to users of the stable updates and when.
As for consistency: our users have explicitly asked for non-conservative, or even "adventurous", updates, see Adam Williamson's poll, so I believe the way to make our users happy while being consistent is to consistently push new versions as updates unless there's a reason not to (and I already detailed possible reasons not to push an update on several occasions, so I won't do it again). But of course this should also be an indicative policy and ultimately the maintainer's decision, as they know best whether there's a reason not to push the update. We should just make it clear that the general policy is for new versions to be pushed unless there's a reason not to.
Can we Improve things? I absolutely think so, but change takes time, well reasoned argument, and people willing to do the work to make it happen.
True change mainly takes a change in attitude in FESCo. Otherwise all the "change" we'll get will be towards more and more bureaucracy. :-(
The fact that a change requires implementation work is a strong hint that the change may be technobureaucratic. Most non-bureaucratic approaches require little to no work to implement.
Kevin Kofler
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 2:02 PM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Kevin Fenzi wrote:
- I read this list every day, and am very mindful of feedback from
developers. Any communication media is good, IMHO. My mailbox is also always open. I think many become discouraged with the mailing list these days because a few people reply to EVERY SINGLE POST with no new thoughts or information. Make a reasoned argument, wait and reply (at a high level) to feedback. Posting a reply to every post repeating yourself just makes less people able or interested in following the discussion.
Then why did you not take such feedback into account when voting? Several people, including some very experienced high-profile packagers, objected to the new update policies. They have been ignored, by you and by the other 7 members.
Whoooooosh.
Kevin Kofler -- there was an interesting msg in that paragraph.
Some of the points you make are valid, and worthy of discussion. Reasonable people may disagree on them, and you'll have to find a way to work within a community where people might disagree on some things with you. Without a particular need to repeat, restate and re-explain your points 100 times, with escalating hyperbole.
You are good communicating, so (at least I, perhaps we) generally get what you mean, in your first post.
cheers,
m
On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 02:20:51AM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote: [...]
Kevin, I was rooting for you, and I particularly agree with you on the issues of trusting maintainers and "devolving" power down to packaging groups and SIGs. It was very disheartening also to see so many votes going N-to-1.
Rich.
On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote: ".
- The prevailing opinion of the electorate of Fedora contributors keeps getting ignored. Feedback on the Fedora devel mailing list is never seen as in any way binding, it's often dismissed as noise or "trolling". The predominant opinion in FESCo is "you voted for us, now we get to do whatever we want", which is flawed in many ways: . It assumes there were true alternatives to vote for instead. This assumption does not look true to me. . It assumes the voters were aware of the positions of all the candidates. I'm fairly sure this was not the case. While I appreciate what has been done in an attempt to solve this issue (questionnaire, townhalls), this has proven by far insufficient to build an opinion on the candidates. I think there's a reason representative democracies normally work with parties/factions and I think something like that might help a lot, depending on what kind of factions would show up. . It assumes representative democracy is a well-working model in the first place, especially in its most hardcore form ("now we get to do whatever we want"). I believe elected representatives should really REPRESENT the people who voted them. I realize politicians aren't doing that, but are they really a good model to follow?
As I have pointed out in both public and private emails to you
1) This is not a representative democracy. For one thing the voting method used does not promote the type of 'democracy' you are expecting. At best people are voted against by not getting points put to them.. not voted for. Range voting build out a 'statistical' average of what it considered the best candidate(s) versus anyone voting for or against someone/something. It like the Debian voting methods are meant to be 'more fair' and thus to remove the emotional baggage of 'voting for/against'. EG if you win a seat you were voted by a vast majority of people and have to represent not just your views but those that have no relation to yours.
2) This is not a federation or a representative democracy. It is at best a limited meritocracy and at worst a constitutional monarchy. You and many others keep thinking that some how by saying it is something over and over again it will somehow become that. It takes a lot more than thousands of repeated emails to change reality. It takes actual thought and hard work on coming up with what you want, and then compromising at some point.
3) Due to the fact that voting is not required for continual 'good-standing' membership in Fedora.. the vast majority of people do not vote. People voted in such 'democracies' are supposed to not only represent those that voted for them, but those who did not vote at all. At times the best anyone can do is just vote what they think best and hope that if they screw it up too badly they will get voted out next time.
You and others want something different? Then start building a constitution, framework, government that you want, but realize that humans are a hard problem. They are mean, lazy, bigotted monsters that can also be noble, hardworking, humane angels sometimes at the same time.
Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
As I have pointed out in both public and private emails to you
[snip]
Why are you telling all this stuff to me? I'm ALREADY complaining about our processes being undemocratic. The points you make are very real. But I don't agree with you that the solution has to be some formal framework. If our representatives actually, well, REPRESENTED their electorate, things would work much better. Now of course none of the representatives knows who voted for them because the vote is anonymous, but as you explained, there are reasons to represent even those who did not vote for oneself, or at all, anyway.
In some cases, the people to represent are even our users, e.g. they asked for "adventurous" updates, so why does the Board decide on a "vision" for conservative updates? Are people that set on their personal preference that they can't see that our users want something different?
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 00:01 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
In some cases, the people to represent are even our users, e.g. they asked for "adventurous" updates, so why does the Board decide on a "vision" for conservative updates? Are people that set on their personal preference that they can't see that our users want something different?
Please stop banding about the forum poll as if it were some sort of scientific measure with meaningful results one could use as a basis for decision making. It was none of that. All it gave us was info we already had. Some users would like more adventurous stuff, while some users would not. We already had that information, the poll told us nothing new.
You also seem to keep thinking that just because a decision was made that a person or some people disagree with, that their input was "ignored". That is not the case. Data can be reviewed and used as part of a decision process, even if that decision ultimately does not agree with you. You are using inflammatory words to try and stir up the pot because boy, it sure does feel good to be angry about something! And boy, it sure does feel good to get other people to feel angry too, even if they have no idea what they're angry about, or whom they are angry at. So quit with the dramatics already.
Jesse Keating wrote:
Please stop banding about the forum poll as if it were some sort of scientific measure with meaningful results one could use as a basis for decision making.
It's the best data we have.
It was none of that. All it gave us was info we already had. Some users would like more adventurous stuff, while some users would not. We already had that information, the poll told us nothing new.
The poll told us an approximate proportion, which is so far from 50-50 (72.13%) that we clearly have a statistically significant majority, also considering the sample size N=183. If you want me to actually compute some p-values and do statistical tests, I can do that, but to me the numbers look obvious.
Now you may try to argue that the sample is biased, but you have no actual evidence towards that.
In the absence of better data, the data we have is what we should use as the basis for our decision, not your personal opinion nor some imaginary "silent majority" which never has been proven to exist.
If you aren't happy with the data, start collecting some better one!
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, 04 May 2010 01:58:34 +0200 Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
The poll told us an approximate proportion, which is so far from 50-50 (72.13%) that we clearly have a statistically significant majority, also considering the sample size N=183.
I'm not sure what the poll was exactly, but a sample size of 183 people makes it utterly meaningless considering the population size.
It gives no useful information one way or the other.
Bernd
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 8:22 PM, Bernd Stramm wrote:
On Tue, 04 May 2010 01:58:34 +0200 Kevin Kofler wrote:
The poll told us an approximate proportion, which is so far from 50-50 (72.13%) that we clearly have a statistically significant majority, also considering the sample size N=183.
I'm not sure what the poll was exactly, but a sample size of 183 people makes it utterly meaningless considering the population size.
After all these years of academic studies, including graduate level Statistics courses, I disagree with your conclusion.
Orcan
On Mon, 3 May 2010 22:04:11 -0400 Orcan Ogetbil oget.fedora@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 8:22 PM, Bernd Stramm wrote:
On Tue, 04 May 2010 01:58:34 +0200 Kevin Kofler wrote:
The poll told us an approximate proportion, which is so far from 50-50 (72.13%) that we clearly have a statistically significant majority, also considering the sample size N=183.
I'm not sure what the poll was exactly, but a sample size of 183 people makes it utterly meaningless considering the population size.
After all these years of academic studies, including graduate level Statistics courses, I disagree with your conclusion.
Orcan
I disagree with the disagreement. For one thing, the poll can only measure anything about the population that knows about it. That population is a very small percentage of the Fedora users. And there is no reason to assume that population is representative of Fedora users.
I too have years of academic studies, and I even graduated from a very respectable institution with an advanced degree :)
Bernd
Bernd Stramm said the following on 05/03/2010 07:13 PM Pacific Time:
On Mon, 3 May 2010 22:04:11 -0400 Orcan Ogetbiloget.fedora@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 8:22 PM, Bernd Stramm wrote:
On Tue, 04 May 2010 01:58:34 +0200 Kevin Kofler wrote:
The poll told us an approximate proportion, which is so far from 50-50 (72.13%) that we clearly have a statistically significant majority, also considering the sample size N=183.
I'm not sure what the poll was exactly, but a sample size of 183 people makes it utterly meaningless considering the population size.
After all these years of academic studies, including graduate level Statistics courses, I disagree with your conclusion.
Orcan
I disagree with the disagreement. For one thing, the poll can only measure anything about the population that knows about it. That population is a very small percentage of the Fedora users. And there is no reason to assume that population is representative of Fedora users.
Wow. It didn't take long :) http://poelcat.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/monty-python-does-the-fedora-develop...
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 01:58 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
Please stop banding about the forum poll as if it were some sort of scientific measure with meaningful results one could use as a basis for decision making.
It's the best data we have.
Bad data is worse than no data.
It was none of that. All it gave us was info we already had. Some users would like more adventurous stuff, while some users would not. We already had that information, the poll told us nothing new.
The poll told us an approximate proportion, which is so far from 50-50 (72.13%) that we clearly have a statistically significant majority, also considering the sample size N=183. If you want me to actually compute some p-values and do statistical tests, I can do that, but to me the numbers look obvious.
Now you may try to argue that the sample is biased, but you have no actual evidence towards that.
Of course the sample is biased. It's a sample of people who frequent the forums, that's a self selecting group of people, by no means a worthwhile representation of the Fedora user base as a whole.
In the absence of better data, the data we have is what we should use as the basis for our decision, not your personal opinion nor some imaginary "silent majority" which never has been proven to exist.
If you aren't happy with the data, start collecting some better one!
Kevin Kofler
Proper scientific data collection is hard, really hard. To do it right would take a lot of time and engineering and even argument. I don't want to put in that time, nor do I think we could ever be able to truly have a good representation as we have no hard data on who all uses Fedora, and in which ways.
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:01 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 01:58 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote: The poll told us an approximate proportion, which is so far from 50-50 (72.13%) that we clearly have a statistically significant majority, also considering the sample size N=183. If you want me to actually compute some p-values and do statistical tests, I can do that, but to me the numbers look obvious.
Now you may try to argue that the sample is biased, but you have no actual evidence towards that.
Of course the sample is biased. It's a sample of people who frequent the forums, that's a self selecting group of people, by no means a worthwhile representation of the Fedora user base as a whole.
Please stop talking about imaginary users who do not care to voice themselves. This is of "zero" use.
The statistic talks. It doesn't only talk. It yells. Ignoring this test statistic in favor of the large pool of imaginary users, who supposedly think in the complete other direction, is not only non-scientific, stupid., but also self-conflicting. The imaginary users do not voice themselves. If you change the policy, do you really expect hundreds of thousands of imaginary users to become real, and start yelling at you? No, they will still remain imaginary. And perhaps, they will start thinking in the other direction and become imaginary evidence for certain people to ignore some further statistical data. This is nonsense.
Sorry for my use of the word "stupid", but this biasedness claim really falls in that category.
Orcan
Once upon a time, Orcan Ogetbil oget.fedora@gmail.com said:
The statistic talks. It doesn't only talk. It yells. Ignoring this test statistic in favor of the large pool of imaginary users, who supposedly think in the complete other direction, is not only non-scientific, stupid., but also self-conflicting.
You claim you have taken grad-level statistics, but you don't appear to understand how to select a sample. A self-selected sample on a web forum (with no basis to show that forum members are representative of the Fedora user base, much less that poll responders represent even the forum users) does not lead to valid statistical results. It doesn't matter how big the sample size is if the samples are not properly selected.
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Orcan Ogetbil said:
The statistic talks. It doesn't only talk. It yells. Ignoring this test statistic in favor of the large pool of imaginary users, who supposedly think in the complete other direction, is not only non-scientific, stupid., but also self-conflicting.
You claim you have taken grad-level statistics, but you don't appear to understand how to select a sample. A self-selected sample on a web forum (with no basis to show that forum members are representative of the Fedora user base, much less that poll responders represent even the forum users) does not lead to valid statistical results. It doesn't matter how big the sample size is if the samples are not properly selected.
No, I exactly know how to select a sample. The forum based sample is "the" perfect sample. It is the users who talk. It is not the imaginary users, who you claim to exist. I do not care about your imaginary users. I do care about those who talk. Hence the statistic is significant.
Orcan
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 22:37 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Orcan Ogetbil said:
The statistic talks. It doesn't only talk. It yells. Ignoring this test statistic in favor of the large pool of imaginary users, who supposedly think in the complete other direction, is not only non-scientific, stupid., but also self-conflicting.
You claim you have taken grad-level statistics, but you don't appear to understand how to select a sample. A self-selected sample on a web forum (with no basis to show that forum members are representative of the Fedora user base, much less that poll responders represent even the forum users) does not lead to valid statistical results. It doesn't matter how big the sample size is if the samples are not properly selected.
No, I exactly know how to select a sample. The forum based sample is "the" perfect sample. It is the users who talk. It is not the imaginary users, who you claim to exist. I do not care about your imaginary users. I do care about those who talk. Hence the statistic is significant.
You aren't a very good statistician if you care. thats an implicit bias.
Dave.
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:45 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
On Mon, 2010-05-03 at 22:37 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Orcan Ogetbil said:
The statistic talks. It doesn't only talk. It yells. Ignoring this test statistic in favor of the large pool of imaginary users, who supposedly think in the complete other direction, is not only non-scientific, stupid., but also self-conflicting.
You claim you have taken grad-level statistics, but you don't appear to understand how to select a sample. A self-selected sample on a web forum (with no basis to show that forum members are representative of the Fedora user base, much less that poll responders represent even the forum users) does not lead to valid statistical results. It doesn't matter how big the sample size is if the samples are not properly selected.
No, I exactly know how to select a sample. The forum based sample is "the" perfect sample. It is the users who talk. It is not the imaginary users, who you claim to exist. I do not care about your imaginary users. I do care about those who talk. Hence the statistic is significant.
You aren't a very good statistician if you care. thats an implicit bias.
... which is far better than an imaginary bias.
Orcan PS: No, I am not a statistician. But I know about the science of statistics to a good degree.
Am Montag, den 03.05.2010, 22:37 -0400 schrieb Orcan Ogetbil:
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Orcan Ogetbil said:
The statistic talks. It doesn't only talk. It yells. Ignoring this test statistic in favor of the large pool of imaginary users, who supposedly think in the complete other direction, is not only non-scientific, stupid., but also self-conflicting.
You claim you have taken grad-level statistics, but you don't appear to understand how to select a sample. A self-selected sample on a web forum (with no basis to show that forum members are representative of the Fedora user base, much less that poll responders represent even the forum users) does not lead to valid statistical results. It doesn't matter how big the sample size is if the samples are not properly selected.
No, I exactly know how to select a sample. The forum based sample is "the" perfect sample. It is the users who talk. It is not the imaginary users, who you claim to exist. I do not care about your imaginary users. I do care about those who talk. Hence the statistic is significant.
You assume here 'imaginary users' don't need to be heard or in your words 'are stupid' and nobody should care about them.
There are also users out there, that don't like such huge threads with all the *_repetitive arguments_* and fight wars. Spamming a mailinglist doesn't change my mind, only ignoring a whole thread - independent from the subject.
-Thomas
2010/5/4 Thomas Spura tomspur@fedoraproject.org:
Am Montag, den 03.05.2010, 22:37 -0400 schrieb Orcan Ogetbil:
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Orcan Ogetbil said:
The statistic talks. It doesn't only talk. It yells. Ignoring this test statistic in favor of the large pool of imaginary users, who supposedly think in the complete other direction, is not only non-scientific, stupid., but also self-conflicting.
You claim you have taken grad-level statistics, but you don't appear to understand how to select a sample. A self-selected sample on a web forum (with no basis to show that forum members are representative of the Fedora user base, much less that poll responders represent even the forum users) does not lead to valid statistical results. It doesn't matter how big the sample size is if the samples are not properly selected.
No, I exactly know how to select a sample. The forum based sample is "the" perfect sample. It is the users who talk. It is not the imaginary users, who you claim to exist. I do not care about your imaginary users. I do care about those who talk. Hence the statistic is significant.
You assume here 'imaginary users' don't need to be heard or in your words 'are stupid' and nobody should care about them.
we can still imagine to hear the imaginary users but they wont manifest... and if they do... get your meds ;)
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Rudolf Kastl che666@gmail.com wrote:
2010/5/4 Thomas Spura tomspur@fedoraproject.org:
Am Montag, den 03.05.2010, 22:37 -0400 schrieb Orcan Ogetbil:
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Orcan Ogetbil said:
Sorry if i answer that one, i had to take one.
The above people and more talked a lot about statistics, useful or not. What i really miss here is just the truth. The truth seems to me that, no matter what poll gets created and no matter what result may be, some people have already decided the future/direction of Fedora. Otherwise they would have created such a poll (a nearly perfect one, since we have so much people here who know how to do that polls) and decided the direction because of that result.
So why is there nobody with balls who says it out loud? Something like "Hey, like it or not, but we want to become a second Ubuntu". Or whatever goal it will be. All this, not telling too much, to beat about the bush, isn't going to help us further and will only create some bigger frustration.
And the direction is obviously not clear to everyone, otherwise we wouldn't have such discussions.
Maybe i'm wrong and nothing is decided, but why don't we do something then and get the data we need to decide the *right* direction in the first place?
Thomas Janssen wrote:
Maybe i'm wrong and nothing is decided, but why don't we do something then and get the data we need to decide the*right* direction in the first place?
Because the "important" people of Fedora have deemed users to be sub-standard humans. Only contributors (ie packagers) have any say in the future of Fedora. In any case, a test user poll was going to be created, but I have not heard about it in a while so I do not know if it is still on the table.
P.S. I am patiently awaiting packager status to earn my elitist status, but it seems reviewing is not as quick as it once was.
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 4:58 PM, Michael Cronenworth mike@cchtml.com wrote:
Thomas Janssen wrote:
Maybe i'm wrong and nothing is decided, but why don't we do something then and get the data we need to decide the*right* direction in the first place?
Because the "important" people of Fedora have deemed users to be sub-standard humans. Only contributors (ie packagers) have any say in the future of Fedora. In any case, a test user poll was going to be created, but I have not heard about it in a while so I do not know if it is still on the table.
Well, i don't want to kill your dreams, but to be a packager means nothing ;)
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/users/packages/thomasj
Thomas Janssen wrote:
Well, i don't want to kill your dreams, but to be a packager means nothing ;)
Yeah, even being a FESCo member is not of much use against a block of 8 other members and the whole Board all voting the same way. :-(
And in fact this observation is what started this whole thread.
Kevin Kofler
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
On 5/4/10, Thomas Janssen thomasj@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Rudolf Kastl che666@gmail.com wrote:
2010/5/4 Thomas Spura tomspur@fedoraproject.org:
Am Montag, den 03.05.2010, 22:37 -0400 schrieb Orcan Ogetbil:
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Orcan Ogetbil said:
Sorry if i answer that one, i had to take one.
The above people and more talked a lot about statistics, useful or not. What i really miss here is just the truth. The truth seems to me that, no matter what poll gets created and no matter what result may be, some people have already decided the future/direction of Fedora.
-- LG Thomas
Dubium sapientiae initium
thank you
chaarles zeitler
Love is the law, love under will.
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Thomas Spura wrote:
Am Montag, den 03.05.2010, 22:37 -0400 schrieb Orcan Ogetbil:
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Orcan Ogetbil said:
The statistic talks. It doesn't only talk. It yells. Ignoring this test statistic in favor of the large pool of imaginary users, who supposedly think in the complete other direction, is not only non-scientific, stupid., but also self-conflicting.
You claim you have taken grad-level statistics, but you don't appear to understand how to select a sample. A self-selected sample on a web forum (with no basis to show that forum members are representative of the Fedora user base, much less that poll responders represent even the forum users) does not lead to valid statistical results. It doesn't matter how big the sample size is if the samples are not properly selected.
No, I exactly know how to select a sample. The forum based sample is "the" perfect sample. It is the users who talk. It is not the imaginary users, who you claim to exist. I do not care about your imaginary users. I do care about those who talk. Hence the statistic is significant.
You assume here 'imaginary users' don't need to be heard or in your words 'are stupid' and nobody should care about them.
You missed the point completely. Please re-read. Let me elaborate.
The biggest problem with FESCo members is, whenever an issue is brought up to them and the issue does not affect some of the FESCo members, they openly say "I don't care, so +1", or "It doesn't matter, -1". You can see this a lot in the calling the Gnome spin "the Gnome spin" thread.
If an issue is brought up to FESCo, that means that there is an issue. FESCo members are not in a position to not care about issues. Kevin Kofler, although he was good in most occasions, fell into the same hole during the "changing updates policy thread" by saying that he thinks that the policy should stay the same. No, it shouldn't stay the same. It bothers some people. Maybe he spent so much time in FESCo that he got accustomed to the ways.
What is stupid is not what minority wants. What is stupid is to imagine that there is a huge pool of users who don't voice their opinion in any platform but supposedly they think in the same direction with FESCo.
No, the people who want a conservative updates policy is the minority (period)
This doesn't mean that they should be completely disregarded. If there is an issue even with minority, FESCo should look for ways to solve it.
I hope I made it clear this time.
Orcan
On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 10:16:48PM -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:01 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 01:58 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote: The poll told us an approximate proportion, which is so far from 50-50 (72.13%) that we clearly have a statistically significant majority, also considering the sample size N=183. If you want me to actually compute some p-values and do statistical tests, I can do that, but to me the numbers look obvious.
Now you may try to argue that the sample is biased, but you have no actual evidence towards that.
Of course the sample is biased. It's a sample of people who frequent the forums, that's a self selecting group of people, by no means a worthwhile representation of the Fedora user base as a whole.
Please stop talking about imaginary users who do not care to voice themselves. This is of "zero" use.
The statistic talks. It doesn't only talk. It yells. Ignoring this test statistic in favor of the large pool of imaginary users, who supposedly think in the complete other direction, is not only non-scientific, stupid., but also self-conflicting. The imaginary users do not voice themselves. If you change the policy, do you really expect hundreds of thousands of imaginary users to become real, and start yelling at you? No, they will still remain imaginary.
I resent being called an imaginary user. Being imaginary would seriously screw with my weekend plans.
Cheers, Peter
And perhaps, they will start thinking in the other direction and become imaginary evidence for certain people to ignore some further statistical data. This is nonsense.
Sorry for my use of the word "stupid", but this biasedness claim really falls in that category.
On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 12:36:25AM -0400, Matt McCutchen wrote:
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 14:20 +1000, Peter Hutterer wrote:
I resent being called an imaginary user. Being imaginary would seriously screw with my weekend plans.
So tell us whether you take the stance on updates that is imputed to the so-called "imaginary users".
Sure, anything to get out of this imaginary state.
- I'm quite happy with the package update policy, and I certainly don't want it to be more adventurous. Things break occasionally and that's fine, but anymore would reduce my productivity.
- Having updates change my UI during a stable release cycle annoys me. Because the last thing I need on a busy morning is to figure out how the new UI works when what I really need to do is sift through my email.
- I don't have a problem with minimum timeframes or stable karma. Because I've screwed up in the past pushing directly to stable, so these days I just send everything to updates-testing, even if I know nothing can possibly screw up.
- IMO, being a maintainer for users goes two ways - I do the packaging work for them and try to fix their bugs, they do the koji voting for me. If they don't, then they'll just have to wait until I get the nag mail that reminds me again.
- I used to hardly ever get enough karma to auto-push to stable and given the packages I maintain that was purely because users didn't bother to vote. I certainly have enough users. So far the world has failed to end because of lack of koji votes.
- I now get enough karma to push to stable most of the times. I don't think the number of users has changed dramatically recently, so the only reason why I'm getting karma now is because people are putting in the effort. Good, that's how it's supposed to work.
- I didn't vote in the fedoraforums poll because I trust FESCo to make sane decisions without me having to randomly trawl forums to make sure I can influence their decisions. So far that worked out for me. YMMV. (Also, I didn't really notice the poll until the matching thread on fedora-devel was already well into lala land.)
- Most of the people I talk to and work with have a sanity level in the upper 50%. So even if there was to be a policy to prevent A, enforce B and require C, I'm sure I can convince the right people to work around it in a real emergency. (Such as telling a user to have a koji voting party to get the package pushed into stable quickly (and that update probably got the highest votes of any of my packages ever :). Just tell your friends it's like a Win 7 release party, that'll get the spirits up.)
I've been mostly watching the flamewars about packaging policy and how Fedora is going to fall apart if we adopt this and that strategy to determine out whether it's me living in an alternative universe or most everyone else. Because while I agree that the process we have can be improved, there's a certain amount of drama visible that seems rather unnecessary.
Cheers, Peter
Peter Hutterer wrote:
- I didn't vote in the fedoraforums poll because I trust FESCo to make
sane decisions without me having to randomly trawl forums to make sure I can influence their decisions. So far that worked out for me. YMMV. (Also, I didn't really notice the poll until the matching thread on fedora-devel was already well into lala land.)
Of course the poll was just a sample. Many people who are for "adventurous" updates also didn't vote in that poll. E.g. I didn't. And I'm definitely for what that poll called "adventurous" updates, though I don't see the "adventure" in pushing new upstream stable releases, and only when they're known to show a decent level of backwards compatibility and no known regressions.
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 17:05 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Of course the poll was just a sample. Many people who are for "adventurous" updates also didn't vote in that poll. E.g. I didn't. And I'm definitely for what that poll called "adventurous" updates, though I don't see the "adventure" in pushing new upstream stable releases, and only when they're known to show a decent level of backwards compatibility and no known regressions.
That's another problem with the poll. "Adventurous" means different things to different people, so you can't assume that everybody is responding to the same thing.
Jesse Keating wrote:
That's another problem with the poll. "Adventurous" means different things to different people, so you can't assume that everybody is responding to the same thing.
"Adventurous" has quite an implication of breakage. A milder term would probably have given an even HIGHER percentage for "adventurous" updates.
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, 04 May 2010 19:10:38 +0200 Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
That's another problem with the poll. "Adventurous" means different things to different people, so you can't assume that everybody is responding to the same thing.
"Adventurous" has quite an implication of breakage. A milder term would probably have given an even HIGHER percentage for "adventurous" updates.
I would like to pick the packages that I'm adventurous with. Currently that's not very easy, either an adventurousness level is enabled in the repos or it isn't. That means my package manager gives me a flood of updates that I don't want. It would be nice to be able to filter that. For my objective, that is a package management issue, fedora policy doesn't need to be changed.
For adventurous bug fixes, perhaps there should be a classification emergency-because-the-bug-breaks-most-of-the-system, which gets pushed with extreme priority. Of course this can result maintainers having to use this classification twice in a row.
Bernd
Bernd Stramm wrote:
I would like to pick the packages that I'm adventurous with. Currently that's not very easy, either an adventurousness level is enabled in the repos or it isn't. That means my package manager gives me a flood of updates that I don't want. It would be nice to be able to filter that. For my objective, that is a package management issue, fedora policy doesn't need to be changed.
What you're asking for is selective updating. This is a very hard problem to solve in practice, and in general unsolvable with a single repo. It is just impossible, with a single repository, to be able to select one type of changes without also accepting unrelated changes. Packages depend on each other, the same package receives changes of varying nature etc. So I am afraid what you're asking for is technically not possible, sorry.
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, 04 May 2010 20:42:18 +0200 Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Bernd Stramm wrote:
I would like to pick the packages that I'm adventurous with. Currently that's not very easy, either an adventurousness level is enabled in the repos or it isn't. That means my package manager gives me a flood of updates that I don't want. It would be nice to be able to filter that. For my objective, that is a package management issue, fedora policy doesn't need to be changed.
What you're asking for is selective updating. This is a very hard problem to solve in practice, and in general unsolvable with a single repo. It is just impossible, with a single repository, to be able to select one type of changes without also accepting unrelated changes. Packages depend on each other, the same package receives changes of varying nature etc. So I am afraid what you're asking for is technically not possible, sorry.
Yes I'm asking for selective updates, I know that. That is a hard problem, I know. But it is not impossible.
If the current package management tools don't make it possible, then the tools can be improved.
This may not be a goal that packaging people want to address at this time, that's fine. But it is not impossible, particularly when you consider that the users of selective updates are being adventurous on purpose.
Bernd
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 15:20 -0400, Bernd Stramm wrote:
On Tue, 04 May 2010 20:42:18 +0200 Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Bernd Stramm wrote:
I would like to pick the packages that I'm adventurous with. Currently that's not very easy, either an adventurousness level is enabled in the repos or it isn't. That means my package manager gives me a flood of updates that I don't want. It would be nice to be able to filter that. For my objective, that is a package management issue, fedora policy doesn't need to be changed.
What you're asking for is selective updating. This is a very hard problem to solve in practice, and in general unsolvable with a single repo. It is just impossible, with a single repository, to be able to select one type of changes without also accepting unrelated changes. Packages depend on each other, the same package receives changes of varying nature etc. So I am afraid what you're asking for is technically not possible, sorry.
Yes I'm asking for selective updates, I know that. That is a hard problem, I know. But it is not impossible.
If the current package management tools don't make it possible, then the tools can be improved.
This may not be a goal that packaging people want to address at this time, that's fine. But it is not impossible, particularly when you consider that the users of selective updates are being adventurous on purpose.
Bernd
-- Bernd Stramm bernd.stramm@gmail.com
To make this happen, we'd have to maintain multiple branches of each package within each release, one branch just for the bugfixes, one branch just for the security fixes, one branch for the enhancements. Then we'd have to publish multiple updates repos for each release, segregated by what type of update builds go into it, so at any time there may be 4 versions of a given package floating around, the GA version, the latest security update version, the latest bugfix version, and the latest new upstream enhancement version.
That represents a significant increase in load on developers, build systems, testers, and even users. It's not that what you as for is impossible, its that the work required to produce it is difficult and too costly.
On Tue, 04 May 2010 14:26:34 -0700 Jesse Keating jkeating@redhat.com wrote:
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 15:20 -0400, Bernd Stramm wrote:
On Tue, 04 May 2010 20:42:18 +0200 Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Bernd Stramm wrote:
I would like to pick the packages that I'm adventurous with. Currently that's not very easy, either an adventurousness level is enabled in the repos or it isn't. That means my package manager gives me a flood of updates that I don't want. It would be nice to be able to filter that. For my objective, that is a package management issue, fedora policy doesn't need to be changed.
What you're asking for is selective updating. This is a very hard problem to solve in practice, and in general unsolvable with a single repo. It is just impossible, with a single repository, to be able to select one type of changes without also accepting unrelated changes. Packages depend on each other, the same package receives changes of varying nature etc. So I am afraid what you're asking for is technically not possible, sorry.
Yes I'm asking for selective updates, I know that. That is a hard problem, I know. But it is not impossible.
If the current package management tools don't make it possible, then the tools can be improved.
This may not be a goal that packaging people want to address at this time, that's fine. But it is not impossible, particularly when you consider that the users of selective updates are being adventurous on purpose.
Bernd
-- Bernd Stramm bernd.stramm@gmail.com
To make this happen, we'd have to maintain multiple branches of each package within each release, one branch just for the bugfixes, one branch just for the security fixes, one branch for the enhancements. Then we'd have to publish multiple updates repos for each release, segregated by what type of update builds go into it, so at any time there may be 4 versions of a given package floating around, the GA version, the latest security update version, the latest bugfix version, and the latest new upstream enhancement version.
That represents a significant increase in load on developers, build systems, testers, and even users. It's not that what you as for is impossible, its that the work required to produce it is difficult and too costly.
Too costly with the current tools, I have no doubt. The method you describe doesn't look manageable, you're right.
Perhaps I should go research packaging systems and strategies, there may be demand for more customizable systems. This is basically the same problem as people generating their own spins.
I was thinking about filtering the updates suggested by the current system. That is more or less what someone has to do manually today if they want to experiment with advanced versions of a particular package.
Bernd
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 17:44 -0400, Bernd Stramm wrote:
I was thinking about filtering the updates suggested by the current system. That is more or less what someone has to do manually today if they want to experiment with advanced versions of a particular package.
That assumes that the only update ever given to a particular package falls into a single category. When in fact, during a Fedora release, one package may see a security update, a bugfix update, a new upstream version, more bugfix updates, and then another security update (the kicker, only applies to that new upstream version).
How do you appropriately filter a fresh install?
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 17:44 -0400, Bernd Stramm wrote:
Too costly with the current tools, I have no doubt. The method you describe doesn't look manageable, you're right.
Perhaps I should go research packaging systems and strategies, there may be demand for more customizable systems. This is basically the same problem as people generating their own spins.
I was thinking about filtering the updates suggested by the current system. That is more or less what someone has to do manually today if they want to experiment with advanced versions of a particular package.
Users who want to be adventurous with particular packages already have options. They can install the rawhide version (rebuilding it against older libraries if necessary) or install from the upstream source. I do this regularly. But Fedora's resources are better focused on supporting a single repository per release.
On Tue, 04 May 2010 21:08:23 -0400 Matt McCutchen matt@mattmccutchen.net wrote:
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 17:44 -0400, Bernd Stramm wrote:
Too costly with the current tools, I have no doubt. The method you describe doesn't look manageable, you're right.
Perhaps I should go research packaging systems and strategies, there may be demand for more customizable systems. This is basically the same problem as people generating their own spins.
I was thinking about filtering the updates suggested by the current system. That is more or less what someone has to do manually today if they want to experiment with advanced versions of a particular package.
Users who want to be adventurous with particular packages already have options. They can install the rawhide version (rebuilding it against older libraries if necessary) or install from the upstream source. I do this regularly. But Fedora's resources are better focused on supporting a single repository per release.
Of course users can do it manually themselves, we all know that. Users can, and do, also install tar.gz packages, bypassing the packaging system altogether.
And making a more heterogenous set of individualized custom spins is not what you want to do for enterprise products in production environments. So the part of Red Hat that is geared towards enterprise level products has to focus on that. An open question is if all of fedora should be following that route as well. You favour that approach.
Bernd
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 5:26 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 15:20 -0400, Bernd Stramm wrote:
On Tue, 04 May 2010 20:42:18 +0200 Kevin Kofler wrote:
Bernd Stramm wrote:
I would like to pick the packages that I'm adventurous with. Currently that's not very easy, either an adventurousness level is enabled in the repos or it isn't. That means my package manager gives me a flood of updates that I don't want. It would be nice to be able to filter that. For my objective, that is a package management issue, fedora policy doesn't need to be changed.
What you're asking for is selective updating. This is a very hard problem to solve in practice, and in general unsolvable with a single repo. It is just impossible, with a single repository, to be able to select one type of changes without also accepting unrelated changes. Packages depend on each other, the same package receives changes of varying nature etc. So I am afraid what you're asking for is technically not possible, sorry.
Yes I'm asking for selective updates, I know that. That is a hard problem, I know. But it is not impossible.
If the current package management tools don't make it possible, then the tools can be improved.
This may not be a goal that packaging people want to address at this time, that's fine. But it is not impossible, particularly when you consider that the users of selective updates are being adventurous on purpose.
To make this happen, we'd have to maintain multiple branches of each package within each release, one branch just for the bugfixes, one branch just for the security fixes, one branch for the enhancements. Then we'd have to publish multiple updates repos for each release, segregated by what type of update builds go into it, so at any time there may be 4 versions of a given package floating around, the GA version, the latest security update version, the latest bugfix version, and the latest new upstream enhancement version.
That represents a significant increase in load on developers, build systems, testers, and even users. It's not that what you as for is impossible, its that the work required to produce it is difficult and too costly.
How about a de-centralized approach: main repo gets only critical fixes. Releng will be responsible only for this repo. Other than this, every major SIG gets their own update repo. They can choose to (but are not required to) be compatible with other SIG's update repo. Once every 6 months they merge best of what they have to the main branch. Users, after installing Fedora, can get to choose what updates repos they want to enable that are compatible.
It's kind of like Linus' git idea. Is this worse than the current 1 centralized repo approach? In theory, it automatically ends the adventurous/conservative updates debate.
Orcan
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 17:44 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 5:26 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 15:20 -0400, Bernd Stramm wrote:
On Tue, 04 May 2010 20:42:18 +0200 Kevin Kofler wrote:
Bernd Stramm wrote:
I would like to pick the packages that I'm adventurous with. Currently that's not very easy, either an adventurousness level is enabled in the repos or it isn't. That means my package manager gives me a flood of updates that I don't want. It would be nice to be able to filter that. For my objective, that is a package management issue, fedora policy doesn't need to be changed.
What you're asking for is selective updating. This is a very hard problem to solve in practice, and in general unsolvable with a single repo. It is just impossible, with a single repository, to be able to select one type of changes without also accepting unrelated changes. Packages depend on each other, the same package receives changes of varying nature etc. So I am afraid what you're asking for is technically not possible, sorry.
Yes I'm asking for selective updates, I know that. That is a hard problem, I know. But it is not impossible.
If the current package management tools don't make it possible, then the tools can be improved.
This may not be a goal that packaging people want to address at this time, that's fine. But it is not impossible, particularly when you consider that the users of selective updates are being adventurous on purpose.
To make this happen, we'd have to maintain multiple branches of each package within each release, one branch just for the bugfixes, one branch just for the security fixes, one branch for the enhancements. Then we'd have to publish multiple updates repos for each release, segregated by what type of update builds go into it, so at any time there may be 4 versions of a given package floating around, the GA version, the latest security update version, the latest bugfix version, and the latest new upstream enhancement version.
That represents a significant increase in load on developers, build systems, testers, and even users. It's not that what you as for is impossible, its that the work required to produce it is difficult and too costly.
How about a de-centralized approach: main repo gets only critical fixes. Releng will be responsible only for this repo. Other than this, every major SIG gets their own update repo. They can choose to (but are not required to) be compatible with other SIG's update repo. Once every 6 months they merge best of what they have to the main branch. Users, after installing Fedora, can get to choose what updates repos they want to enable that are compatible.
It's kind of like Linus' git idea. Is this worse than the current 1 centralized repo approach? In theory, it automatically ends the adventurous/conservative updates debate.
I would think it leaves users with a fairly poor and confusing experience. It also requires a significant amount of infrastructure coordination to ensure that the important fixes wind up in all the extra repos. The potential for clashing repos goes up too, which is no fun for a user to try and slog through.
Jesse Keating wrote:
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 17:44 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
How about a de-centralized approach: main repo gets only critical fixes. Releng will be responsible only for this repo. Other than this, every major SIG gets their own update repo. They can choose to (but are not required to) be compatible with other SIG's update repo. Once every 6 months they merge best of what they have to the main branch. Users, after installing Fedora, can get to choose what updates repos they want to enable that are compatible.
It's kind of like Linus' git idea. Is this worse than the current 1 centralized repo approach? In theory, it automatically ends the adventurous/conservative updates debate.
I would think it leaves users with a fairly poor and confusing experience. It also requires a significant amount of infrastructure coordination to ensure that the important fixes wind up in all the extra repos. The potential for clashing repos goes up too, which is no fun for a user to try and slog through.
Yet it's exactly what will happen if you insist on conservative updates. Repos like kde-redhat will pick up the slack and provide updates. It's very easy to set a third-party repo, you can't stop people from providing what they want to provide. Nor can you really stop us from closing all bugs filed against the conservative official repo as WONTFIX with a comment of "fixed in kde-redhat stable, please use that".
Kevin Kofler
On Wed, 2010-05-05 at 00:16 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Nor can you really stop us from closing all bugs filed against the conservative official repo as WONTFIX with a comment of "fixed in kde-redhat stable, please use that".
If that practice became a problem, it would be escalated through the appropriate channels and Fedora would look for a maintainer more willing to cooperate with their update policies. Are you so sure you have a monopoly on KDE maintenance talent that you can make such a threat?
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 11:10 AM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
That's another problem with the poll. "Adventurous" means different things to different people, so you can't assume that everybody is responding to the same thing.
"Adventurous" has quite an implication of breakage. A milder term would probably have given an even HIGHER percentage for "adventurous" updates.
Actually adventurous is a positive word association like freedom. People associate it overwhelmingly with good things versus downsides. It is why everyone from armies to travel organizations use it in recruitment posters. It is a standard Marketing 101 catch phrase to make people think highly of something.
This thread is now closed. We've received repeated complaints about the redundancy of it.
No further posts to this thread will be allowed.
Thank You, Seth Vidal Fedora Hall Monitor https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Hall_Monitor_Policy
On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 02:45:53PM -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
This thread is now closed. We've received repeated complaints about the redundancy of it.
No further posts to this thread will be allowed.
Thank You, Seth Vidal Fedora Hall Monitor https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Hall_Monitor_Policy
Clarification please, how does redundancy fit under the Hall Monitor Policy?
The basis of the Hall Monitor Policy is:
The Fedora Board has adopted a simple motto for general behavior as a member of the Fedora Project. It is simply "Be excellent to each other".
There doesn't seem to be any lack of courtesy present in the thread yet. So it doesn't seem to fall under the current policy. If "signal to noise" is a valid reason for hall monitoring it should be added to the policy through the appropriate process.
-Toshio
On Tue, 4 May 2010, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 02:45:53PM -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
This thread is now closed. We've received repeated complaints about the redundancy of it.
No further posts to this thread will be allowed.
Thank You, Seth Vidal Fedora Hall Monitor https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Hall_Monitor_Policy
Clarification please, how does redundancy fit under the Hall Monitor Policy?
The basis of the Hall Monitor Policy is:
The Fedora Board has adopted a simple motto for general behavior as a member of the Fedora Project. It is simply "Be excellent to each other".
There doesn't seem to be any lack of courtesy present in the thread yet. So it doesn't seem to fall under the current policy. If "signal to noise" is a valid reason for hall monitoring it should be added to the policy through the appropriate process.
* Hall monitors are allowed to send 'thread closure' posts to aggressive or problematic mailing list threads to curtail issues before they become serious enough to warrant an official warning. When this is done the subject line of the message will be prefixed with [HALL-MONITORED] and a link to this wiki page is included in the message.
-sv
On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 02:45:53PM -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
This thread is now closed. We've received repeated complaints about the redundancy of it.
No further posts to this thread will be allowed.
I'm disappointed that the thread is closed when there seems to be an issue that isn't resolved.
Wouldn't it be better to try to focus the discussion rather than ignore the issues?
Call me cynical but I don't see how 'repeated complaints' is justification to end a thread. Were there more people complaining than those participating? It's very easy to ignore a thread if you think it's unimportant.
-Cam
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Camilo Mesias wrote:
On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 02:45:53PM -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
This thread is now closed. We've received repeated complaints about the redundancy of it.
No further posts to this thread will be allowed.
I'm disappointed that the thread is closed when there seems to be an issue that isn't resolved.
Wouldn't it be better to try to focus the discussion rather than ignore the issues?
Call me cynical but I don't see how 'repeated complaints' is justification to end a thread. Were there more people complaining than those participating? It's very easy to ignore a thread if you think it's unimportant.
Apparently, 3 user+2 moderator complaints [1] are enough to close a thread.
This is quite ironic since the statistics of a poll of 180 real users were regarded insignificant and biased by the same people.
Anyway, there is not much more to say until the elections. This fact will be reminded in its glory detail when the time comes.
Orcan
[1] statistics taken directly form the person who closed the thread.
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 11:57 PM, Orcan Ogetbil oget.fedora@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Camilo Mesias wrote:
On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 02:45:53PM -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
This thread is now closed. We've received repeated complaints about the redundancy of it.
No further posts to this thread will be allowed.
I'm disappointed that the thread is closed when there seems to be an issue that isn't resolved.
Wouldn't it be better to try to focus the discussion rather than ignore the issues?
Call me cynical but I don't see how 'repeated complaints' is justification to end a thread. Were there more people complaining than those participating? It's very easy to ignore a thread if you think it's unimportant.
Apparently, 3 user+2 moderator complaints [1] are enough to close a thread.
This is quite ironic since the statistics of a poll of 180 real users were regarded insignificant and biased by the same people.
WTH?
Please read up what statistics even mean ... this has nothing do do with statistics and polling.
But whatever...
Seth Vidal wrote:
* Hall monitors are allowed to send 'thread closure' posts toaggressive or problematic mailing list threads to curtail issues before they become serious enough to warrant an official warning. When this is done the subject line of the message will be prefixed with [HALL-MONITORED] and a link to this wiki page is included in the message.
This vague paragraph can be abused to justify censoring pretty much everything.
Thank you for pointing out yet another undemocratic policy passed by one of our committees (in this case the Board) against the wishes of a large part of our community, restricting the usage of a mailing list for its very purpose: discussion. You can arbitrarily censor any discussion you don't like without even giving a reason.
That's all I'm going to add to this subthread.
Kevin Kofler
2010/5/4 Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at:
Seth Vidal wrote:
* Hall monitors are allowed to send 'thread closure' posts to aggressive or problematic mailing list threads to curtail issues before they become serious enough to warrant an official warning. When this is done the subject line of the message will be prefixed with [HALL-MONITORED] and a link to this wiki page is included in the message.
This vague paragraph can be abused to justify censoring pretty much everything.
Thank you for pointing out yet another undemocratic policy passed by one of our committees (in this case the Board) against the wishes of a large part of our community, restricting the usage of a mailing list for its very purpose: discussion. You can arbitrarily censor any discussion you don't like without even giving a reason.
well there are a few potential solution to this:
1) try to get rid of this policy 2) use different lists/forums to continue the discussion.
you pick which one is worth to go ahead with. this is not a democracy, and it has been stated often enough by all people involved, not even an indirect one.
kind regards, Rudolf Kastl
That's all I'm going to add to this subthread.
Kevin Kofler
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On Wed, 2010-05-05 at 07:37 +0200, Rudolf Kastl wrote:
well there are a few potential solution to this:
- try to get rid of this policy
- use different lists/forums to continue the discussion.
you pick which one is worth to go ahead with. this is not a democracy, and it has been stated often enough by all people involved, not even an indirect one.
Right. Someone in the community should set up a suitable list or forum, identical in charter but with weaker restrictions on "unconstructive" discussion. It could even be called Mail Fission. Volunteers? I could do it if no one else wants to. Or does such a venue already exist?
We'll see how many people join. If very many people do, the board may be persuaded to change the policy; if not, that would suggest that the current policy is acceptable to the community at large.
On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 11:10:39PM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Seth Vidal wrote:
* Hall monitors are allowed to send 'thread closure' posts toaggressive or problematic mailing list threads to curtail issues before
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This is nonsense. The problematic could be individual e-mails, but it's not reason to stop the whole discussion. If you see an aggressive e-mail then ask author of the e-mail to be more polite, but never try to control whole discussion.
they become serious enough to warrant an official warning. When this is done the subject line of the message will be prefixed with [HALL-MONITORED] and a link to this wiki page is included in the message.
This vague paragraph can be abused to justify censoring pretty much everything.
Thank you for pointing out yet another undemocratic policy passed by one of
+1 The Hall Monitor Policy is cancer.
All sane e-mail clients support "delete e-mail" and "delete thread" functions. It's better to have 1000 useless e-mails in INBOX than 1 HALL-MONITORED e-mail. Yes, freedom is expensive...
Karel
Dne 6.5.2010 12:28, Karel Zak napsal(a):
Thank you for pointing out yet another undemocratic policy passed by one of
+1 The Hall Monitor Policy is cancer.
+1000 it feels to me like in a bad old Communism when the open debate was allowed only when it didn't touch the leading role of the Communist Party. I really don't think anybody in this thread said anything so sacrilegious that the thread should be terminated.
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 11:22 PM, Matěj Cepl mcepl@redhat.com wrote:
Dne 6.5.2010 12:28, Karel Zak napsal(a):
Thank you for pointing out yet another undemocratic policy passed by one of
+1 The Hall Monitor Policy is cancer.
+1000 it feels to me like in a bad old Communism when the open debate was allowed only when it didn't touch the leading role of the Communist Party. I really don't think anybody in this thread said anything so sacrilegious that the thread should be terminated.
+1, this is nonsense
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Dne 6.5.2010 23:22, Matěj Cepl napsal(a):
+1000 it feels to me like in a bad old Communism when the open debate was allowed only when it didn't touch the leading role of the Communist Party. I really don't think anybody in this thread said anything so sacrilegious that the thread should be terminated.
And, BTW when reading http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-board-meeting/2010-05-06/fedora_boar... about this, I was shocked how this group of high-technology guys have apparently never seen newsreader or email reader capable of killing a thread. Any newsreader (including the one in Thunderbird or any other from plenty of the ones we have in Fedora) can just eliminate boring threads (from the point of view of reader) forever by one clicking of the mouse / pressing of the key. If you don't know, this list is bidirectionally mirrored to the newsgroup gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel at nntp://news.gmane.org.
Matěj
On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 23:22 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 6.5.2010 12:28, Karel Zak napsal(a):
Thank you for pointing out yet another undemocratic policy passed by one of
+1 The Hall Monitor Policy is cancer.
+1000 it feels to me like in a bad old Communism when the open debate was allowed only when it didn't touch the leading role of the Communist Party. I really don't think anybody in this thread said anything so sacrilegious that the thread should be terminated.
Normally, I'd be against it killing a thread, but the thread that started this discussion had already been done awhile back and this new thread added *nothing* new to the discussion. Frankly, it was more deserving to be on Slashdot more than the fedora-devel list. The Hall Monitors were totally justified in killing this one imo, and frankly if folks want more repetitive flame-bait threads like that I've got zero interest in staying subscribed to it.
Later, /B
On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 05:46:21PM -0400, Brian Pepple wrote:
On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 23:22 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 6.5.2010 12:28, Karel Zak napsal(a):
Thank you for pointing out yet another undemocratic policy passed by one of
+1 The Hall Monitor Policy is cancer.
+1000 it feels to me like in a bad old Communism when the open debate was allowed only when it didn't touch the leading role of the Communist Party. I really don't think anybody in this thread said anything so sacrilegious that the thread should be terminated.
Normally, I'd be against it killing a thread, but the thread that started this discussion had already been done awhile back and this new thread added *nothing* new to the discussion. Frankly, it was more
This all is your subjective opinion. There is not objective and unbiased way how evaluate any discussion, it's unmeasurable. That's the reason why Hall Monitor Policy is nonsense.
Karel
On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 00:26 +0200, Karel Zak wrote:
On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 05:46:21PM -0400, Brian Pepple wrote:
Normally, I'd be against it killing a thread, but the thread that started this discussion had already been done awhile back and this new thread added *nothing* new to the discussion. Frankly, it was more
This all is your subjective opinion. There is not objective and unbiased way how evaluate any discussion, it's unmeasurable. That's the reason why Hall Monitor Policy is nonsense.
Please enlighten me then on what new information was added to this thread that wasn't in the prior thread that warranted keeping it alive?
Later, /B
2010/5/7 Brian Pepple bpepple@fedoraproject.org:
On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 00:26 +0200, Karel Zak wrote:
On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 05:46:21PM -0400, Brian Pepple wrote:
Normally, I'd be against it killing a thread, but the thread that started this discussion had already been done awhile back and this new thread added *nothing* new to the discussion. Frankly, it was more
This all is your subjective opinion. There is not objective and unbiased way how evaluate any discussion, it's unmeasurable. That's the reason why Hall Monitor Policy is nonsense.
Please enlighten me then on what new information was added to this thread that wasn't in the prior thread that warranted keeping it alive?
one could argue that even that is now a redundant question that hasnt anything to do with fedora development and doesent belong to this list and is therefor "redundant". thats the whole point that is beeing expressed here. it depends on the point of view if discussions are valuable, helpful, creative and have a positive outcome or not.
and i want to add something else... sometimes if people come up with "stupid" ideas some other people read it... laugh... and develop a good idea out of some points of the basically "stupid" one. beeing creative requires to have input... the wilder the input the more innovative the output can be.
as linux users we unfortunately are all a vocal minority in the world outside of the project. we are loud though and we get our ways. that might explain why some people are pretty loud and atleast try to drive their way... thats what alot older community members did the last 10 to 20 years. i dont want to find excuses or justify anything... just state a few facts to explain some discussed circumstances and some of the psychology behind it... since that seemed to be an open question in the meeting.
one of the questions raised in the meeting posted by mcepl was... "why dont those people leave if they are unhappy". simple... they put alot sweat blood and tears into a project, and they have friends... with the development crowd and with the community in general. they are obviously feeling as a part of it with just a different pov and an own opinion. that isnt bad at all ... but healthy... "diversity is healthy" to a project.
and lastly just a personal opinion... i think what drives this project (and i hope the people i give support to in #fedora on a daily basis forgive me) are the developers. they are the most important entity that keep the projects alive and going. If we are good in what we do the users will come on their own... i personally as much as i love this project do not really care how big our user base is... i care how big our developer base is... and i hope that in the future we are not ruling out or excluding people just because they express a different opinion and try to drive it. it is exactly those kind of people that use up their spare time and work unpaid on projects like fedora because their heart is just beating for the project... else theyd have left for good and just used their spare time for other purposes.
kind regards, Rudolf Kastl
p.s. i am not claiming to be objective, just trying to interpret what i see.
Later, /B -- Brian Pepple bpepple@fedoraproject.org
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Bpepple gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 810CC15E BD5E 6F9E 8688 E668 8F5B CBDE 326A E936 810C C15E
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On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Rudolf Kastl che666@gmail.com wrote:
one of the questions raised in the meeting posted by mcepl was... "why dont those people leave if they are unhappy". simple... they put alot sweat blood and tears into a project, and they have friends... with the development crowd and with the community in general. they are obviously feeling as a part of it with just a different pov and an own opinion. that isnt bad at all ... but healthy... "diversity is healthy" to a project.
Constructive... additive ...diversity in opinion is healthy. But there is a line at which debate can turn unhealthy and destructive... when repetitive discussion becomes shrill in its desire to be informative...becomes over reaching in its need to be persuasive. Unfortunately what we have seen lately is a somewhat self propogating cycle that we repeat when issues are multi-faceted.
People who have taken their shot at making a persuasive argument to change the minds of a particular audience can feel like they are being ignored when their arguments end up not being persuasive. Ratcheting up the heat( and number of capitalized words) in the next opportunity to restate their arguments brings more attention from others who have not noticed previous rounds in the discussion but in fact make the original audience more likely to tune out what is being said. And the cycle repeats spiralling downward towards a CapsLock doomsday as the participants become more entrenched in their points of view and less forgiving of other people's. Personal foibles and slights both real and imagined pile up into a palatable physiological barrier and people just end up talking at each other.
For the sake of everyone's sanity we have to find a way out of this cycle. Letting these sorts of fires burn out on their own doesn't seem like the best way to manage our communication commons. And yes I'm throwing stones while standing in my own glass house, I can be sucked into bad behavior as easily as anyone else and being told I'm beating a dead horse is the appropriate thing to do.
-jef"It's seldom going to end well when one of the most active participants in any thread proclaims at the start that they are burned out on the issues. It's difficult to see how one can simultaneously be burned-out as well as a constructive voice on the issues. Passion can fight against effectiveness"spaleta
On 05/06/2010 07:28 PM, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Rudolf Kastlche666@gmail.com wrote:
one of the questions raised in the meeting posted by mcepl was... "why dont those people leave if they are unhappy". simple... they put alot sweat blood and tears into a project, and they have friends... with the development crowd and with the community in general. they are obviously feeling as a part of it with just a different pov and an own opinion. that isnt bad at all ... but healthy... "diversity is healthy" to a project.
Constructive... additive ...diversity in opinion is healthy. But there is a line at which debate can turn unhealthy and destructive... when repetitive discussion becomes shrill in its desire to be informative...becomes over reaching in its need to be persuasive. Unfortunately what we have seen lately is a somewhat self propogating cycle that we repeat when issues are multi-faceted.
People who have taken their shot at making a persuasive argument to change the minds of a particular audience can feel like they are being ignored when their arguments end up not being persuasive. Ratcheting up the heat( and number of capitalized words) in the next opportunity to restate their arguments brings more attention from others who have not noticed previous rounds in the discussion but in fact make the original audience more likely to tune out what is being said. And the cycle repeats spiralling downward towards a CapsLock doomsday as the participants become more entrenched in their points of view and less forgiving of other people's. Personal foibles and slights both real and imagined pile up into a palatable physiological barrier and people just end up talking at each other.
Totally off-topic, but I think "Spiralling Downward Towards a CapsLock Doomsday" would be a fantastic band name.
-J
For the sake of everyone's sanity we have to find a way out of this cycle. Letting these sorts of fires burn out on their own doesn't seem like the best way to manage our communication commons. And yes I'm throwing stones while standing in my own glass house, I can be sucked into bad behavior as easily as anyone else and being told I'm beating a dead horse is the appropriate thing to do.
-jef"It's seldom going to end well when one of the most active participants in any thread proclaims at the start that they are burned out on the issues. It's difficult to see how one can simultaneously be burned-out as well as a constructive voice on the issues. Passion can fight against effectiveness"spaleta
On 05/07/2010 08:56 AM, Seth Vidal wrote:
On Fri, 7 May 2010, Jon Ciesla wrote:
Totally off-topic, but I think "Spiralling Downward Towards a CapsLock Doomsday" would be a fantastic band name.
Or possibly a Cory Doctrow book.
-sv
That totally skipped my mind. That would be much better. I'd totally read that book, because I can imagine where he'd take the concept.
CCing same. :)
-J
Dne 7.5.2010 01:01, Rudolf Kastl napsal(a):
one of the questions raised in the meeting posted by mcepl was... "why dont those people leave if they are unhappy". simple... they put alot sweat blood and tears into a project, and they have friends... with the development crowd and with the community in general. they are obviously feeling as a part of it with just a different pov and an own opinion. that isnt bad at all ... but healthy... "diversity is healthy" to a project.
I didn't to continue in this thread, but here I have to defend myself. I don't remember I would say anything like that, but it looks to me like taken out of the context at least and expressing exactly opposite position I think I held. Although I don't agree with many of them in a lot of places, I strongly support Kevin's, Ralf's and others position that the current development is very harmful to the development of Fedora and I would love them to stay and defend this still nice project we all work on.
Actually, http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/dissidents/ made me so angry that I am just not able to write any response to it ... whatever I would write would be too much personal half-libelous attack, so I will rather write nothing.
Matěj
On 05/07/2010 08:48 AM, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Although I don't agree with many of them in a lot of places, I strongly support Kevin's, Ralf's and others position that the current development is very harmful to the development of Fedora and I would love them to stay and defend this still nice project we all work on.
Here's the rub, though: Kevin argues for aggressive development and empowering the package maintainers to push out changes, even if it resulted in temporary regressions. Ralf, on the other hand, reminds us about the need for quality control, process and stability. They can't both be right---but the entire project is better off for them voicing their opinions.
There's a lot of research in social psychology suggesting that large groups engaged in transparent and open discussion make better decisions, statistically speaking, so a broad discussion exploring the entire spectrum of opinions is exactly what we need.
We just can't let it become personal and acrimonious. This is an obligation for everyone to take the 'extreme' voices at face value: assume good faith, which, by the way, is a great life principle in most circumstances. It is also an obligation on those who take an unpopular view: voice it to the best of your ability but don't take it personally if your argument doesn't take the day.
On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 10:56 -0400, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
On 05/07/2010 08:48 AM, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Although I don't agree with many of them in a lot of places, I strongly support Kevin's, Ralf's and others position that the current development is very harmful to the development of Fedora and I would love them to stay and defend this still nice project we all work on.
Here's the rub, though: Kevin argues for aggressive development and empowering the package maintainers to push out changes, even if it resulted in temporary regressions. Ralf, on the other hand, reminds us about the need for quality control, process and stability. They can't both be right---but the entire project is better off for them voicing their opinions.
(Note to non-native English speakers, and native speakers for that matter: I'm using "you" in the second person plural here. I am not addressing Przemek, or anyone else, specifically.)
Be very very careful with that last bit. Voicing your opinion is a right you have. But it's not the case that the project is always better off if you do so. There are poisonous ideas, and poisonous behaviours, and yours might be one of them.
- ajax
Dne 7.5.2010 16:56, Przemek Klosowski napsal(a):
Here's the rub, though: Kevin argues for aggressive development and empowering the package maintainers to push out changes, even if it resulted in temporary regressions. Ralf, on the other hand, reminds us about the need for quality control, process and stability. They can't both be right---but the entire project is better off for them voicing their opinions.
Well, I would argue that both can be right (although I believe Ralf would strongly disagree with me on this point). The point in Kevin's triades which I am afraid was utterly rejected (or ignored) is that the most important relationship in whole Fedora land is the relationship between package maintainer and users of the package she maintains.
When I came to Fedora from the Debian-world (around FC6 release) I was absolutely in awe how better experience was maintaining packages in Fedora than in Debian. It seemed like the combination of best of being completely independent and maintaining your own repository (what would be now called PPA; I haven't heard the term then yet) and having support and community of fellow maintainers all in one package. It was refreshing to see how problems were just solved on the spot without need to apply for permission and a lot of bureaucracy. The result was incredibly rapid development (I remember I was using as an advertisement slogan “Fedora? Next release of your distribution today!”).
This vision in my opinion requires freedom for packagers of individual packages to have quite wide allowance in setting their own policies concerning updates and bug fixing. If Kevin prefers to have packages on all distros synchronized and (maybe, I don't know, I don't use KDE) broken much more often than Gnome-folks, it is in my opinion mostly between KDE team and KDE users. Also, if they don't think they can manage much more than pushing all non-packaging bugs upstream, I am not the one who would preach to them they should do better (especially without providing manpower to do so). OTOH, if Ralph doesn't won't to push almost any bug upstream and he wants to make sure that all Fedora bugs are fixed asap, great for his users, they will certainly love him, but I am not sure it should be fixed as a rule for everybody.
This kind of "shared PPA" vision doesn't exclude some kind of stricter requirements on critical-path packages ... if glibc or kernel is broken, than basically everybody is affected and these components should be fixed fast to allow others to work. But I would think that this critical path should be really short ... glibc, kernel, udev & co. and it should end somewhere at xorg-x11-* packages, but not much more. Certainly the critical packages shouldn't cover by far “all what normal user needs for his work” (including OpenOffice.org and Firefox), “whatever is on LiveCD”, or “in the end everything” (all three ideas I have actually heard).
Of course, this kind of development process doesn’t produce distro stable enough I could put it on my company’s server (or my mom’s notebook), but it could be an ideal distro for developers or contributors of any kind (with reference to http://smoogespace.blogspot.com/2010/05/at-least-they-had-burning-cloud-to.h... by contributor I mean anybody who provides any bits to the distro ... packagers, artists, translators, tech writers, QA folks, yes, even admins; I would say that somebody just handing the DVD to a friend is doing good job in promoting the distro, but he isn't contributor in my meaning of the word).
It seems to me that the current fashion is going sharply against this vision of "shared PPA". There is more and more policies, permissions, preliminary testing, etc. Suddenly packaging for Fedora is less and less fun and more and more chore, which I don't want to dwell in. I have left most of packaging last year (for various personal and non-personal reasons) but I don't feel much urge to return to packaging anymore. Or in other words, if I need some package, I can package it myself, but I tend to keep all packages in my personal repository, and not bother with all permissions, reviews, guildelines, policies (which is not to say that there are no guidelines which could be helpful). I don't need that much bandwidth and storage for my personal needs any (which is the key resource current establishment controls). I wonder how many packagers (or former packagers) feels the same.
More and more I was writing this email, more and more I tend to agree with somebody today, who wrote that they key problem of the Fedora community is unclear vision about its purpose. I agree completely. I believe, that in the root of many of our problems lies in our unwillingness to say that we are not end-user-oriented distribution, but the contributors-oriented one.
There are many who pretends that it is possible to be both CentOS (or Ubuntu) and Fedora-as-we-knew-it at the same time, at that additional bureaucracy has no costs for development. I think it does, and that the current trend doesn't lead to excellency in our core mission. We may end up being the second (or even first) Ubuntu in terms of number of users. But I really don't think the size matters in the question of how much value we bring to the whole Linux community at all. By deserting the position of developer-oriented distro I think whole Linux community looses one excellent part, and in the end we may be just another end-users oriented Ubuntu (maybe slightly better) ... who cares?
Best,
Matěj
On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 5:41 PM, Matěj Cepl mcepl@redhat.com wrote:
Dne 7.5.2010 16:56, Przemek Klosowski napsal(a):
Here's the rub, though: Kevin argues for aggressive development and empowering the package maintainers to push out changes, even if it resulted in temporary regressions. Ralf, on the other hand, reminds us about the need for quality control, process and stability. They can't both be right---but the entire project is better off for them voicing their opinions.
Well, I would argue that both can be right (although I believe Ralf would strongly disagree with me on this point). The point in Kevin's triades which I am afraid was utterly rejected (or ignored) is that the most important relationship in whole Fedora land is the relationship between package maintainer and users of the package she maintains.
When I came to Fedora from the Debian-world (around FC6 release) I was absolutely in awe how better experience was maintaining packages in Fedora than in Debian. It seemed like the combination of best of being completely independent and maintaining your own repository (what would be now called PPA; I haven't heard the term then yet) and having support and community of fellow maintainers all in one package. It was refreshing to see how problems were just solved on the spot without need to apply for permission and a lot of bureaucracy. The result was incredibly rapid development (I remember I was using as an advertisement slogan "Fedora? Next release of your distribution today!").
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. Things don't break mid-release, they aren't spending all their time updating to whatever is in Fedora and finding yet again its broken. And when things are broken, people seem nicer.
Now does this happen a lot, probably not.. but for most developers it just has to happen one or two times at the worst time and they will go find something both new and stable for them. Yes they aren't getting the latest stuff anymore.. 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.)
This vision in my opinion requires freedom for packagers of individual packages to have quite wide allowance in setting their own policies concerning updates and bug fixing. If Kevin prefers to have packages on all distros synchronized and (maybe, I don't know, I don't use KDE) broken much more often than Gnome-folks, it is in my opinion mostly between KDE team and KDE users. Also, if they don't think they can manage much more than pushing all non-packaging bugs upstream, I am not the one who would preach to them they should do better (especially without providing manpower to do so). OTOH, if Ralph doesn't won't to push almost any bug upstream and he wants to make sure that all Fedora bugs are fixed asap, great for his users, they will certainly love him, but I am not sure it should be fixed as a rule for everybody.
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.
At a certain size there are too many packages and too few packagers who meet the level of people back when Fedora Extras was the big thing, and you had to deal with getting critiqued directly by Ralph and similar others.
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
2010/5/8 Matěj Cepl mcepl@redhat.com:
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.
I think many of us in this thread are in agreement on this issue. We just word it differently enough that we don't realize it ;).
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).
No my selection was pretty limited to 4 or 5 people I noticed at a talk who I was pretty sure had had Fedora desktops a couple of years ago. Very unscientific... but I would not get testimonials from because they are even worse in their persuasive power over people. I believe it is something we need to study.
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.)
Ugh I needed to reword that sentence it makes no sense. I meant to say
The various gnome apps that break because some dependency added ibus and it didn't work for some reason. The way I worded could be viewed as derogatory to KDE when I was trying to find examples where both groups have had issues.
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
Actually my example was supposed to be about vim or whatever causes Linus pain. The reason people take notice of the problem was because it affected someone in a way that gets LWN notice. It was also supposed to be about how a maintainer may not know how his package is affecting people because its included in something that it wasn't before.
Ugh I write horribly on a Friday it would seem.
2010/5/8 Matěj Cepl mcepl@redhat.com:
Of course, this kind of development process doesn’t produce distro stable enough I could put it on my company’s server (or my mom’s notebook), but it could be an ideal distro for developers or contributors of any kind
I am a developer and i want my workstation more stable than my mother laptop (and yes we both use Fedora). Indeed my home deploy server has F-11, my daily eclipse workstation has F-12, and i have rawhide in a kvm to do package maintenance.
I dont want to be thrown daily updates on the first two, but i think 8-9 month is a good enough compromise for an upgrade; so i',m pretty comfortable with Fedora release cycle.
Even if you don't develop for work, lets say you are contributing to some oss project, i don't think working on an "adventurous" environment is a good idea; do you want to be stopped for bugs in libraries your code base depends on?
So, such an environment turns useful for distro developers, but a distro for distro developers sounds so silly to me.
On the other hand, i have my living room htpc with fedora and update-candidates turned on (and atrpms-bleeding to be precise). So i get all those updates daily, hoping some of the (very minor in comparison to those i *could* have on my work pc) issues go away.
I have choice; and no, i'm not configuring all like that because fesco told me. I understand and respect any different opinion, but please don't imply i don't exists, because i think i am a pretty standard figure in end-user realm.
Cheers
Matěj Cepl said the following on 05/07/2010 04:41 PM Pacific Time:
More and more I was writing this email, more and more I tend to agree with somebody today, who wrote that they key problem of the Fedora community is unclear vision about its purpose. I agree completely. I believe, that in the root of many of our problems lies in our unwillingness to say that we are not end-user-oriented distribution, but the contributors-oriented one.
It is not a binary situation.
On 05/08/2010 02:40 AM, John Poelstra wrote:
Matěj Cepl said the following on 05/07/2010 04:41 PM Pacific Time:
More and more I was writing this email, more and more I tend to agree with somebody today, who wrote that they key problem of the Fedora community is unclear vision about its purpose. I agree completely. I believe, that in the root of many of our problems lies in our unwillingness to say that we are not end-user-oriented distribution, but the contributors-oriented one.
That somebody being *me* and no you fail to understand the underlying issue Matěj we can be both be an end-user-oriented distribution and the contributors-oriented one but as long as one "vision" governs the project that will never happen. Projects and their contributions are not being treated equally within the project and that truly is the underlying issue and that's OK as long as contributors are told that that is what they are signing up for which by the way they have not been nor currently is being done.
JBG
On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 19:40 -0700, John Poelstra wrote:
Matěj Cepl said the following on 05/07/2010 04:41 PM Pacific Time:
More and more I was writing this email, more and more I tend to agree with somebody today, who wrote that they key problem of the Fedora community is unclear vision about its purpose. I agree completely. I believe, that in the root of many of our problems lies in our unwillingness to say that we are not end-user-oriented distribution, but the contributors-oriented one.
It is not a binary situation.
I'm tempted to agree in practice with Matej that it is. I don't think we can kid ourselves that we're doing a particularly good job of making a desktop for end users; if we were, we wouldn't be being trashed by Ubuntu in this area (let alone OS X and Windows). Yes, yes, I know, Ubuntu's statistics are unreliable and all that crap. I know we can all rationalize for ten hours about how it's all Microsoft's fault for being evil and Ubuntu's fault for being good at marketing and users' fault for being stupid and blah de freaking blah.
But be practical. When you go to $RANDOM_LINUX_CONFERENCE (never mind when you go to the coffee shop, I have never seen anyone else running Fedora in any situation outside of the 'Linux world'), how many people are running Fedora and how many are running Ubuntu? Have you noticed how, whenever _any_ third party site posts reader statistics, the first thing you see is that Linux is tiny, and the second thing you see is that a heavy pluarality of the Linux numbers are Ubuntu? Example: Distrowatch prints user agent stats, not just page hit rankings. http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awstats.DistroWatch.com.osdetail.html . Ubuntu is at 16.5%. Fedora is at 1.3%, on which number we are being beaten by OpenSUSE and PCLinuxOS (and being trounced by Linux Mint, a shoestring budgeted Ubuntu derivative), and just outpacing Debian and Mandriva. Yep, a grand 1.3% of the people who visit a general-purpose Linux news site are running Fedora when they do it. Please, _please_, do not attempt to rationalize or excuse or except these numbers; they're just an example (I know some people will, despite this explicit request; I intend to entirely ignore them). Every site I've ever seen print its user agent stats tells a similar story. Does anyone actually want to claim that this kind of thing is a stunning success story for Fedora as a general purpose desktop operating system?
Those numbers aren't lying. I think this discussion should always be informed by the fundamental understanding that, if we're talking about making an attractive general-purpose operating system for end users, we're currently fairly shit at it. We're not a shit project, we do a lot of valuable work that needs to be done, and produce products that are great in certain ways. But we should either get a better understanding of what we are actually good at and valuable for and work on those things, or if we're serious about being an end-user desktop, get a lot better at it. Which would probably involve doing some things a lot of members of the project would be unhappy with. Frankly, I don't think this project is currently laid out in such a way that doing that would be very practical; it's very difficult to engender radical change in Fedora as a project.
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 12:09 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 19:40 -0700, John Poelstra wrote:
Matěj Cepl said the following on 05/07/2010 04:41 PM Pacific Time:
More and more I was writing this email, more and more I tend to agree with somebody today, who wrote that they key problem of the Fedora community is unclear vision about its purpose. I agree completely. I believe, that in the root of many of our problems lies in our unwillingness to say that we are not end-user-oriented distribution, but the contributors-oriented one.
It is not a binary situation.
I'm tempted to agree in practice with Matej that it is. I don't think we can kid ourselves that we're doing a particularly good job of making a desktop for end users; if we were, we wouldn't be being trashed by Ubuntu in this area (let alone OS X and Windows). Yes, yes, I know, Ubuntu's statistics are unreliable and all that crap. I know we can all rationalize for ten hours about how it's all Microsoft's fault for being evil and Ubuntu's fault for being good at marketing and users' fault for being stupid and blah de freaking blah.
But be practical. When you go to $RANDOM_LINUX_CONFERENCE (never mind when you go to the coffee shop, I have never seen anyone else running Fedora in any situation outside of the 'Linux world'), how many people are running Fedora and how many are running Ubuntu? Have you noticed how, whenever _any_ third party site posts reader statistics, the first thing you see is that Linux is tiny, and the second thing you see is that a heavy pluarality of the Linux numbers are Ubuntu? Example: Distrowatch prints user agent stats, not just page hit rankings. http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awstats.DistroWatch.com.osdetail.html . Ubuntu is at 16.5%. Fedora is at 1.3%, on which number we are being beaten by OpenSUSE and PCLinuxOS (and being trounced by Linux Mint, a shoestring budgeted Ubuntu derivative), and just outpacing Debian and Mandriva. Yep, a grand 1.3% of the people who visit a general-purpose Linux news site are running Fedora when they do it. Please, _please_, do not attempt to rationalize or excuse or except these numbers; they're just an example (I know some people will, despite this explicit request; I intend to entirely ignore them). Every site I've ever seen print its user agent stats tells a similar story. Does anyone actually want to claim that this kind of thing is a stunning success story for Fedora as a general purpose desktop operating system?
Those numbers aren't lying. I think this discussion should always be informed by the fundamental understanding that, if we're talking about making an attractive general-purpose operating system for end users, we're currently fairly shit at it. We're not a shit project, we do a lot of valuable work that needs to be done, and produce products that are great in certain ways. But we should either get a better understanding of what we are actually good at and valuable for and work on those things, or if we're serious about being an end-user desktop, get a lot better at it. Which would probably involve doing some things a lot of members of the project would be unhappy with. Frankly, I don't think this project is currently laid out in such a way that doing that would be very practical; it's very difficult to engender radical change in Fedora as a project.
(Note: user == "end user" here)
Well there are technical, legal, marketing and structural reasons for this.
Fedora is received as an unstable bleeding edge distro, that while Ubuntu is marketing itself as "just works". Neither might be 100% true, but the we do seems to suck at providing a usable update experience .... shit just randomly break (a user does not give a damn why broken == broken period).
And no it is not like Ubuntu users can't get the newer software during a release cycle there are PPAs for almost everything; so if user A wants a shiny new version of foo ... chances are high that he will find a PPA shipping this.
Ubuntu seems to be more present in the media; it goes even that far that some people think Linux == Ubuntu ... but any marketing wouldn't be helpful as long as we don't provide the experience users want.
Distributions like Linux Mint find its users by the simple fact that they don't give a damn about software patents; not much we can do here, but for a user a distro that plays/runs everything out of the box is perceived as "better" than one where you have to jump through hops to get stuff working. Users don't want to spend the their time configuring the system but actually *using* it.
Making any change is much harder than it should be; we always end up in endless discussions without any outcome while others like Ubuntu seems to have a better decision making process; and seriously I think this is the one which basically blocks us from addressing any issue (making a change that makes everyone happy is impossible, but we should get to a point were we can stop talking and just *do* something).
Personally I think Fedora is good at what it does, and although it causes me some frustration that Fedora isn't better at wooing mass market users, I wouldn't want to make radical changes to structures and processes to chase some goals.
There would be much easier and more painless ways to woo these users without actually changing how Fedora is put together. I'm talking about marketing, evangelism and education. If there are technical issues that are found to hold this back then let them be addressed, but don't change the project and risk alienating the contributors for the sake of *theoretical* improvements.
Adam - I use Fedora at home - one server and four laptop / PC workstations. It's very fit for purpose, in fact has less downtime and is more easily maintained than the two Windows machines we have. My mum uses Fedora too. At work we use CentOS but that is historical, we might as easily be running Fedora. I think the barriers to mass adoption by and large aren't technical. Also these goals really shouldn't be used as a rationale for changes unless you are sure of what you will achieve.
-Cam
On Sun, 2010-05-09 at 12:16 +0100, Camilo Mesias wrote:
Personally I think Fedora is good at what it does, and although it causes me some frustration that Fedora isn't better at wooing mass market users, I wouldn't want to make radical changes to structures and processes to chase some goals.
I agree - as I said, I don't think Fedora is a bad project at what it actually achieves.
Adam - I use Fedora at home - one server and four laptop / PC workstations. It's very fit for purpose, in fact has less downtime and is more easily maintained than the two Windows machines we have. My mum uses Fedora too. At work we use CentOS but that is historical, we might as easily be running Fedora. I think the barriers to mass adoption by and large aren't technical. Also these goals really shouldn't be used as a rationale for changes unless you are sure of what you will achieve.
This is what's called 'damning with faint praise' =). I mostly agree, but the point is, we're not bringing something amazing and special to the table. In harsh practical terms we're possibly a bit better than Windows for a few people, probably a little worse for a lot of people. That's not really turning anyone's excitement crank, is it? We can all talk about our anecdotal experiences like this if we like, but the fundamental point is that, if we were building a stunningly better desktop operating system than the alternatives, people would be flocking to use it. They aren't, ergo we're not.
Dne 9.5.2010 12:09, Adam Williamson napsal(a):
Making any change is much harder than it should be; we always end up in endless discussions without any outcome while others like Ubuntu seems to have a better decision making process; and seriously I think this is the one which basically blocks us from addressing any issue
Yes, I know that I am slightly opposing myself, but just to emphasize that I am not for total anarchy ... I think it is no mistake that most successful free projects are governed by BDFL of some kind. I believe that just a one person doing tiny little bit required to run the community (with support from community in doing actual work) would be much better than our current attempts to pretend we are democracy.
Matěj
On 05/09/2010 06:09 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
I'm tempted to agree in practice with Matej that it is. I don't think we can kid ourselves that we're doing a particularly good job of making a desktop for end users; if we were, we wouldn't be being trashed by Ubuntu in this area (let alone OS X and Windows). Yes, yes, I know, Ubuntu's statistics are unreliable and all that crap. I know we can all
I am inclined to agree too - we are a ** technical distro ** and a good one at that. There is a balance between really up to date and yet still stable ... fedora (tho it struggles now and again) has managed to largely find that balance.
Congrats fedora team!!
I run several servers on fedora (mail, web, file and a couple of very decent firewalls) in addition to a suite of desktop and laptops running fedora.
Some of the desktops are used by some highly non-sophisticated users (parents, parents in-law, spouse, children, friends for example).
I think what makes these Aunt Tilly users work well using Fedora, is the presence of one or more experienced fedora admins behind the scenes - who can manage their systems and provide the expertise to add the missing pieces to make the system just-works for them - and act as help desk once in a while too! (Some support of course we did even when they ran windows ... )
That said, the amount of admin'ing (I include performaing remote backups over ssh) is generally not too much work - it does include the occasional vnc-over-ssh to 'fix a window' problem too ;-)
Fedora has not (wont?) license H.264 like ubuntu ...
All my users (quite a few) absolutely rest on my opinion/expertise to make the decisions for them and help them add functionality when needed.
Fedora is a great distro - we do reach Aunt Tilly too - just not by her installing F12 herself ... we do it for her.
Fedora is a strong technical distro - Linus may even be using it ;-) and it serves technical users/admins extremely well.
Fedora is ** The Technical Distro **
gene
On Sun, 2010-05-09 at 11:09 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
I'm tempted to agree in practice with Matej that it is. I don't think we can kid ourselves that we're doing a particularly good job of making a desktop for end users; if we were, we wouldn't be being trashed by Ubuntu in this area (let alone OS X and Windows). Yes, yes, I know, Ubuntu's statistics are unreliable and all that crap. I know we can all rationalize for ten hours about how it's all Microsoft's fault for being evil and Ubuntu's fault for being good at marketing and users' fault for being stupid and blah de freaking blah.
But be practical. When you go to $RANDOM_LINUX_CONFERENCE (never mind when you go to the coffee shop, I have never seen anyone else running Fedora in any situation outside of the 'Linux world'), how many people are running Fedora and how many are running Ubuntu? Have you noticed how, whenever _any_ third party site posts reader statistics, the first thing you see is that Linux is tiny, and the second thing you see is that a heavy pluarality of the Linux numbers are Ubuntu? Example: Distrowatch prints user agent stats, not just page hit rankings. http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awstats.DistroWatch.com.osdetail.html . Ubuntu is at 16.5%. Fedora is at 1.3%, on which number we are being beaten by OpenSUSE and PCLinuxOS (and being trounced by Linux Mint, a shoestring budgeted Ubuntu derivative), and just outpacing Debian and Mandriva. Yep, a grand 1.3% of the people who visit a general-purpose Linux news site are running Fedora when they do it. Please, _please_, do not attempt to rationalize or excuse or except these numbers; they're just an example (I know some people will, despite this explicit request; I intend to entirely ignore them). Every site I've ever seen print its user agent stats tells a similar story. Does anyone actually want to claim that this kind of thing is a stunning success story for Fedora as a general purpose desktop operating system?
Those numbers aren't lying. I think this discussion should always be informed by the fundamental understanding that, if we're talking about making an attractive general-purpose operating system for end users, we're currently fairly shit at it. We're not a shit project, we do a lot of valuable work that needs to be done, and produce products that are great in certain ways. But we should either get a better understanding of what we are actually good at and valuable for and work on those things, or if we're serious about being an end-user desktop, get a lot better at it. Which would probably involve doing some things a lot of members of the project would be unhappy with. Frankly, I don't think this project is currently laid out in such a way that doing that would be very practical; it's very difficult to engender radical change in Fedora as a project. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net
I fully agree with every single word. (I would imagine that I'm not alone)
... But I'm not sure that FESCo shares your opinion - far from it.
This leaves us in a very precarious position: One on hand, if FESCo keeps changing Fedora into hybrid-semi-community-driven-Ubuntu, they risk losing many technical users/small maintainers such as myself, read: People who prefer Fedora over Ubuntu -because- it is technical, bleeding edge and community driven. On the other hand, if FESCo keeps the uneasy 'statu quo' without any real definition of what Fedora is really about, neither the technical group nor the I-want-to-be-Ubuntu group (let alone the I want to be RHEL/CentOS group) will be happy, and in the end, Fedora will continue losing both developers and users.
If we, as a -community- project, want to remain relevant, it is time to decide who we are and what is our goal. Thus far, it seemed that the both the user and the developer communities were left out of these proceedings, and everything was more-or-less decided by FESCO, which left (large?) parts of the developer community feeling left out. Far worse, many attempts to try and openly discuss these issues ended up being shot down by the hall monitors.
As I recall, you've polled FedoraForum users about their view of Fedora a couple of months ago and as far as I know, there results were more-or-less ignored. Maybe its time to repeat this poll (I'd extent it to both FAS users and FedoraForum users. This should cover both the developer and the hard-core user communities), but this time with FESCO blessing.
- Gilboa "Hopefully this discussion won't be ignored" Davara
On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 20:34:57 +0300, Gilboa Davara gilboad@gmail.com wrote:
Thus far, it seemed that the both the user and the developer communities were left out of these proceedings, and everything was more-or-less decided by FESCO, which left (large?) parts of the developer community feeling left out.
The board has been trying to answer questions related to this (who is Fedora for). And I think they recently completed that task. I think the next thing up would be to look at how well we are or aren't serving the people who Fedora is supposed to be for.
A good starting point for this work is at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Unfinished_Board_issues
There is a board election coming up and it is a good time to ask prospective board members questions related to the future of Fedora.
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Bruno Wolff III bruno@wolff.to wrote:
On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 20:34:57 +0300, Gilboa Davara gilboad@gmail.com wrote:
Thus far, it seemed that the both the user and the developer communities were left out of these proceedings, and everything was more-or-less decided by FESCO, which left (large?) parts of the developer community feeling left out.
The board has been trying to answer questions related to this (who is Fedora for).
Which is wrong (not the outcome but the whole discussion itself), there is *NO* reason why an operating system which is easy to use is hard do develop on and vice versa.
Both MS and Apple prove that this is wrong.
Just hiding our failure to address both needs isn't really a great way forward.
On 05/10/2010 12:37 AM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 20:34:57 +0300, Gilboa Davara gilboad@gmail.com wrote:
Thus far, it seemed that the both the user and the developer communities were left out of these proceedings, and everything was more-or-less decided by FESCO, which left (large?) parts of the developer community feeling left out.
The board has been trying to answer questions related to this (who is Fedora for). And I think they recently completed that task. I think the next thing up would be to look at how well we are or aren't serving the people who Fedora is supposed to be for.
They already have the results at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base
Rahul
On Sun, 2010-05-09 at 14:07 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 20:34:57 +0300, Gilboa Davara gilboad@gmail.com wrote:
Thus far, it seemed that the both the user and the developer communities were left out of these proceedings, and everything was more-or-less decided by FESCO, which left (large?) parts of the developer community feeling left out.
The board has been trying to answer questions related to this (who is Fedora for). And I think they recently completed that task. I think the next thing up would be to look at how well we are or aren't serving the people who Fedora is supposed to be for.
A good starting point for this work is at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Unfinished_Board_issues
There is a board election coming up and it is a good time to ask prospective board members questions related to the future of Fedora.
I believe you missed my point. I don't claim that the board ignored this issue. Far from it. I am claiming that having the board make this decision without the involving of the community is slowly (?) driving both developers and users away.
As for the coming FESCO election, I may be alone on this matter, but even though I took the time to read the nominees mission statement, I can't say that I really know what each nominee think about this issue. This more-or-less negates the effectiveness of using the coming FESCO election as a policy changer. (Though as I said, I may be alone on this issue)
- Gilboa
On Sun, 9 May 2010, Gilboa Davara wrote:
On Sun, 2010-05-09 at 14:07 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 20:34:57 +0300, Gilboa Davara gilboad@gmail.com wrote:
Thus far, it seemed that the both the user and the developer communities were left out of these proceedings, and everything was more-or-less decided by FESCO, which left (large?) parts of the developer community feeling left out.
The board has been trying to answer questions related to this (who is Fedora for). And I think they recently completed that task. I think the next thing up would be to look at how well we are or aren't serving the people who Fedora is supposed to be for.
A good starting point for this work is at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Unfinished_Board_issues
There is a board election coming up and it is a good time to ask prospective board members questions related to the future of Fedora.
I believe you missed my point. I don't claim that the board ignored this issue. Far from it. I am claiming that having the board make this decision without the involving of the community is slowly (?) driving both developers and users away.
Since we had no focus before, everyone who had any interest in anything joined Fedora. Now that they're here they have conflicting views on what Fedora should be. If you think we should vote, go join debian. I think they do that there. In the meantime our community is suffering far more infighting then before because everyone thinks their version is the right version. As we narrow our focus, people are going to find they fall outside of that focus.
Bottom line is we should have done what we're doing now long ago, so we're suffering the consequences as a result. Lots of people with conflicting views are now here. Our lack of focus has just hurt us.
Have you used OSX lately? They're playing in a whole different league and a whole different game then we are. It's not even a comparison. Not only do we copy OSX but we do so poorly. For those that have problem with apple or want a "more free" OS, Ubuntu's got the share. We're just not there. Fedora's board isn't driving users and developers away, our OS is.
The worst part is we won't get those users back with a marginally better product.
-Mike
On Sun, 2010-05-09 at 15:27 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
If you think we should vote, go join debian. I think they do that there.
First, I never said we should 'vote'. I talked about community involvement. Second, if you are looking at the sure path to drive people away, sending them to "go join Debian" will be it. (Though, in your defense, I did the same more than once, so I can't really blame you without sharing the blame)
In the meantime our community is suffering far more infighting then before because everyone thinks their version is the right version. As we narrow our focus, people are going to find they fall outside of that focus.
Bottom line is we should have done what we're doing now long ago, so we're suffering the consequences as a result. Lots of people with conflicting views are now here. Our lack of focus has just hurt us.
I fully agree. With every single word.
I do not agree that that working with zero community input is the way to achieve a working compromise. (And input does not equal vote)
Have you used OSX lately? They're playing in a whole different league and a whole different game then we are. It's not even a comparison. Not only do we copy OSX but we do so poorly. For those that have problem with apple or want a "more free" OS, Ubuntu's got the share. We're just not there. Fedora's board isn't driving users and developers away, our OS is.
The worst part is we won't get those users back with a marginally better product.
I can't really comment on it. (Don't have OSX, never tried it) Though, I would imagine that Fedora is compared to Ubuntu and Windows 7; I doubt that OSX is even on the list.
- Gilboa
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 07:28 +0300, Gilboa Davara wrote:
I do not agree that that working with zero community input is the way to achieve a working compromise. (And input does not equal vote)
What makes you think that no community input is considered?
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 11:05 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 07:28 +0300, Gilboa Davara wrote:
I do not agree that that working with zero community input is the way to achieve a working compromise. (And input does not equal vote)
What makes you think that no community input is considered?
Let me reverse the question: How did they gather the community input?
From whom it was gathered?
What was the question? What was the answer?
- Gilboa
On Tue, 2010-05-11 at 01:28 +0300, Gilboa Davara wrote:
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 11:05 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 07:28 +0300, Gilboa Davara wrote:
I do not agree that that working with zero community input is the way to achieve a working compromise. (And input does not equal vote)
What makes you think that no community input is considered?
Let me reverse the question: How did they gather the community input?
From whom it was gathered?
What was the question? What was the answer?
- Gilboa
Most likely by reading or participating in the various threads on subjects that have happened on this list and the FAB list and the desktop list and others. It seems to be a rather big assumption that board decisions are made in a vacuum.
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 16:19 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
Let me reverse the question: How did they gather the community input?
From whom it was gathered?
What was the question? What was the answer?
- Gilboa
Most likely by reading or participating in the various threads on subjects that have happened on this list and the FAB list and the desktop list and others. It seems to be a rather big assumption that board decisions are made in a vacuum.
It seems that we don't share the same definition of community input and community involvement.
For the sake of the Fedora project, I do hope that you're right and I'm wrong.
- Gilboa
On 05/09/2010 10:27 PM, Mike McGrath wrote:
Bottom line is we should have done what we're doing now long ago, so we're suffering the consequences as a result. Lots of people with conflicting views are now here. Our lack of focus has just hurt us.
Have you used OSX lately?
Have you ever talked to Ubuntu/openSUSE users and listened to their replies when telling them you are using Fedora?
You will hear answers along the line of too much inconvenience to get multimedia working, too unstable (in the sense of low MTBF), "I tried Fedora once, but had suffered from xxxx-failures", no usable system-config GUI, ...
They're playing in a whole different league and a whole different game then we are.
Quite likely. But do you think Fedora plays in the league Ubuntu and openSUSE are playing?
IMO, no, they are aiming at a different target audience. It's great that Fedora hasn't! Fedora plays in the league of "developer distros" and RH-derived distros.
It's not even a comparison. Not only do we copy OSX but we do so poorly.
Note what you wrote: _copy_
As one former FPB member once has put it: Fedora is in danger to become a Ubuntu cult - Except that you refer to OSX instead of Ubuntu, this exactly what you seem to propose. - May-be it's not obvious to you, but by copying you can only loose, because you'll always be second.
The worst part is we won't get those users back with a marginally better product.
Right, but IMO you are taming the horse from the wrong end.
The primary causes of Fedora being on the loose are * US patent laws preventing users from having a "great multimedia experience" (a key feature of "Aunt Tilly" users. * Fedora being utilized as a test bed for immature SW. (inacceptable for "Aunt Tilly", adds complications for "non-Aunt Tilly users"). * Fedora not having a nice "system setup tools" (Necessary for "Aunt Tilly")
Ralf
Dne 10.5.2010 06:54, Ralf Corsepius napsal(a):
Have you ever talked to Ubuntu/openSUSE users and listened to their replies when telling them you are using Fedora?
You will hear answers along the line of too much inconvenience to get multimedia working, too unstable (in the sense of low MTBF), "I tried Fedora once, but had suffered from xxxx-failures", no usable system-config GUI, ...
I heard these arguments many times and some of them are fair, but some of them just are not ... how less difficult it could be to get multimedia working than clicking on two links (http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noa... and http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stab...) and agreeing on the inserting new repository?
Matěj
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Matěj Cepl mcepl@redhat.com wrote:
Dne 10.5.2010 06:54, Ralf Corsepius napsal(a):
Have you ever talked to Ubuntu/openSUSE users and listened to their replies when telling them you are using Fedora?
You will hear answers along the line of too much inconvenience to get multimedia working, too unstable (in the sense of low MTBF), "I tried Fedora once, but had suffered from xxxx-failures", no usable system-config GUI, ...
I heard these arguments many times and some of them are fair, but some of them just are not ... how less difficult it could be to get multimedia working than clicking on two links (http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noa... and http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stab...) and agreeing on the inserting new repository?
To have stuff just work.
Dne 10.5.2010 11:26, drago01 napsal(a):
To have stuff just work.
Go to http://senate.gov/ and ask your congressman to fix it. Otherwise (for example if you don't have your congressman because you are not a U.S. citizen), you can also try to move Red Hat's headquarters outside of U.S. (although I am not sure, it would be enough, you would probably ask its biggest clients to move).
Matěj
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Matěj Cepl mcepl@redhat.com wrote:
Dne 10.5.2010 11:26, drago01 napsal(a):
To have stuff just work.
Go to http://senate.gov/ and ask your congressman to fix it. Otherwise (for example if you don't have your congressman because you are not a U.S. citizen), you can also try to move Red Hat's headquarters outside of U.S. (although I am not sure, it would be enough, you would probably ask its biggest clients to move).
I didn't say that we can fix it; just that it *is* easier in other distributions.
Dne 10.5.2010 11:35, drago01 napsal(a):
I didn't say that we can fix it; just that it *is* easier in other distributions.
Which don't have principal headquarters of their sponsor in US (but on the Isle of Man, which was chosen exactly because of its lax legal and especially tax, true, regime). Instead of comparing with Ubuntu, how is our configuration more complicated than OpenSuSE, which is in different situation (Novell being US company)?
Matěj
Matěj Cepl wrote:
Which don't have principal headquarters of their sponsor in US (but on the Isle of Man, which was chosen exactly because of its lax legal and especially tax, true, regime). Instead of comparing with Ubuntu, how is our configuration more complicated than OpenSuSE, which is in different situation (Novell being US company)?
They have a "Community Repositories" menu entry which allows enabling the Packman repository, which is basically the equivalent of RPM Fusion for us: http://opensuse-community.org/Repositories/11.2
Apparently, their lawyers think that's OK, Red Hat's think otherwise.
Kevin Kofler
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 11:33 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 10.5.2010 11:26, drago01 napsal(a):
To have stuff just work.
Go to http://senate.gov/ and ask your congressman to fix it. Otherwise (for example if you don't have your congressman because you are not a U.S. citizen), you can also try to move Red Hat's headquarters outside of U.S. (although I am not sure, it would be enough, you would probably ask its biggest clients to move).
That's the wrong argument. We all know why we _can't_ make it just work, but that doesn't excuse us. Sorry to take a well-worn analogy, but if two guys are trying to sell you cars, and one doesn't have an engine, would the fact that the guy selling the car with no engine has a *really good and inarguable reason* why it doesn't have an engine make you buy that car? Hell no. You'd buy the car with the engine.
Just because we have a *really good reason* we can't ship this stuff doesn't mean we are excused from the fact that it's a distinct negative for the use of our operating system as a general-purpose desktop operating system.
Dne 10.5.2010 12:48, Adam Williamson napsal(a):
That's the wrong argument. We all know why we _can't_ make it just work, but that doesn't excuse us. Sorry to take a well-worn analogy, but if two guys are trying to sell you cars, and one doesn't have an engine, would the fact that the guy selling the car with no engine has a *really good and inarguable reason* why it doesn't have an engine make you buy that car? Hell no. You'd buy the car with the engine.
Sure, it is no excuse, and
a) I was not the one trying to make Fedora into "general-purpose desktop OS", b) if this is really really important to you, there is enough Linux distros where you can spend your effort.
I think we have nothing else to say, so let's just not saying that.
Matěj
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 13:21 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 10.5.2010 12:48, Adam Williamson napsal(a):
That's the wrong argument. We all know why we _can't_ make it just work, but that doesn't excuse us. Sorry to take a well-worn analogy, but if two guys are trying to sell you cars, and one doesn't have an engine, would the fact that the guy selling the car with no engine has a *really good and inarguable reason* why it doesn't have an engine make you buy that car? Hell no. You'd buy the car with the engine.
Sure, it is no excuse, and
a) I was not the one trying to make Fedora into "general-purpose desktop OS", b) if this is really really important to you, there is enough Linux distros where you can spend your effort.
I think we have nothing else to say, so let's just not saying that.
I think we're arguing the same point - that that is not where Fedora's strengths lie. But it's important not to get lost in the knee-jerk rationalizations and point-scoring when it comes to discussing Fedora compared to other OSes or distributions, because then it starts to sound like we _are_ trying to argue that people who'd be better off running something else should just run Fedora and suck up the inconveniences.
/*Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com*/ wrote on 05/10/2010 3:18:06 PM +0450:
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 11:33 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 10.5.2010 11:26, drago01 napsal(a):
To have stuff just work.
Go to http://senate.gov/ and ask your congressman to fix it. Otherwise (for example if you don't have your congressman because you are not a U.S. citizen), you can also try to move Red Hat's headquarters outside of U.S. (although I am not sure, it would be enough, you would probably ask its biggest clients to move).
That's the wrong argument. We all know why we _can't_ make it just work, but that doesn't excuse us. Sorry to take a well-worn analogy, but if two guys are trying to sell you cars, and one doesn't have an engine, would the fact that the guy selling the car with no engine has a *really good and inarguable reason* why it doesn't have an engine make you buy that car? Hell no. You'd buy the car with the engine.
Just because we have a *really good reason* we can't ship this stuff doesn't mean we are excused from the fact that it's a distinct negative for the use of our operating system as a general-purpose desktop operating system.
Just my 0.2 cents in this regard: well, we have a car without engine, and a suitable engine is built somewhere which we can't use. But, I wonder why there is nobody to pick our car and the engine and sell the car with engine to people who don't want to do that themselves? RPMFusion is a very well-known engine builder! While there were/are some efforts to ship our car with its engine, there is no well-known Fedora remix which contains the extra stuff (it is probably because most of the current users have already adopted with using rpmfusion if they want it). If we can come up with enough people to provide and maintain a Fedora remix for awhile, it can become well-known and something which is always there, so we can point beginners to that one instead of other distros if they want such a distro. We (I and a very few others) are going to create a remix, but our current target users are a bit more restricted (mostly because of lack of manpower) (Also we are currently targeting a DVD installation media rather than live media). But if there are some other interested people out there, we can go for the mentioned remix (and we will probably base our custom remix on that).
Good luck, Hedayat
On 10/05/10 15:05, Hedayat Vatankhah wrote: --snipp--
On ۱۰/۰۵/۱۰ 06:38, Frank Murphy wrote:
On 10/05/10 15:05, Hedayat Vatankhah wrote: --snipp--
Thanks, I thought that the project is dead (IIRC, it was not provided for F11 last time I checked, but apparently I'm wrong). I'll contact him to see if he is interested in providing DVD's too.
Thanks again, Hedayat
On 05/10/2010 08:20 PM, Hedayat Vatankhah wrote:
On ۱۰/۰۵/۱۰ 06:38, Frank Murphy wrote:
On 10/05/10 15:05, Hedayat Vatankhah wrote: --snipp--
Thanks, I thought that the project is dead (IIRC, it was not provided for F11 last time I checked, but apparently I'm wrong). I'll contact him to see if he is interested in providing DVD's too.
The Fedora 12 image is a Live image of 1.3 GB size. As the FAQ would tell you, I am not interested in maintaining more variants but I welcome you to contribute if you are interested in maintaining them.
Rahul
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Hedayat Vatankhah hedayat@grad.com wrote:
Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote on 05/10/2010 3:18:06 PM +0450:
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 11:33 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 10.5.2010 11:26, drago01 napsal(a):
To have stuff just work.
Go to http://senate.gov/ and ask your congressman to fix it. Otherwise (for example if you don't have your congressman because you are not a U.S. citizen), you can also try to move Red Hat's headquarters outside of U.S. (although I am not sure, it would be enough, you would probably ask its biggest clients to move).
That's the wrong argument. We all know why we _can't_ make it just work, but that doesn't excuse us. Sorry to take a well-worn analogy, but if two guys are trying to sell you cars, and one doesn't have an engine, would the fact that the guy selling the car with no engine has a *really good and inarguable reason* why it doesn't have an engine make you buy that car? Hell no. You'd buy the car with the engine.
Just because we have a *really good reason* we can't ship this stuff doesn't mean we are excused from the fact that it's a distinct negative for the use of our operating system as a general-purpose desktop operating system.
Just my 0.2 cents in this regard: well, we have a car without engine, and a suitable engine is built somewhere which we can't use. But, I wonder why there is nobody to pick our car and the engine and sell the car with engine to people who don't want to do that themselves? RPMFusion is a very well-known engine builder! While there were/are some efforts to ship our car with its engine, there is no well-known Fedora remix which contains the extra stuff (it is probably because most of the current users have already adopted with using rpmfusion if they want it). If we can come up with enough people to provide and maintain a Fedora remix for awhile, it can become well-known and something which is always there, so we can point beginners to that one instead of other distros if they want such a distro. We (I and a very few others) are going to create a remix, but our current target users are a bit more restricted (mostly because of lack of manpower) (Also we are currently targeting a DVD installation media rather than live media). But if there are some other interested people out there, we can go for the mentioned remix (and we will probably base our custom remix on that).
Trademarks ... you can't call it Fedora anymore and would effectively be a different distro.
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:48 AM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
That's the wrong argument. We all know why we _can't_ make it just work, but that doesn't excuse us.
You are right. The answer is clearly to export US legal rules to the rest of the world so we can have an equally unfriendly playing field.
Sorry to take a well-worn analogy, but if two guys are trying to sell you cars, and one doesn't have an engine, would the fact that the guy selling the car with no engine has a *really good and inarguable reason* why it doesn't have an engine make you buy that car? Hell no. You'd buy the car with the engine.
1) Are we talking about purchased products.. where money changes hands?
2) There are laws concerning the purchasing of illicit goods..stolen engines are no different.
3) OEM Ubuntu customers _are_ _paying_ licensing fees for the stuff that end users can find for free in Ubuntu preinstalls. http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Canonical-clarifies-its-H-264-licence...
The reality is Canonical's customers are not end-users. Canonical's customers are OEMs. general Ubuntu interest, and the media hype that can produce in places like twitter, are leveraged to entice the target audience..the OEMs...to contract with Canonical.
Just because we have a *really good reason* we can't ship this stuff doesn't mean we are excused from the fact that it's a distinct negative for the use of our operating system as a general-purpose desktop operating system
Yes, principled approaches to product production can look like a negative in the short term. You want an analogy.... proprietary media is the computing equivalent of ready to eat,mass marketed processed convenience food. Its the software version of junkfood and soda and pizza rolls and dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets. It's unsustainable, and unhealth....and tastes sooooo very good. So even though sugary salty brightly colored food-like cubes are clearly popular and in demand.. is catering to this in the best interest of anyone? Some people don't think so and choose to support a better way to produce and distribute food...going as far as to limit what they choose to consume in supporting an overall more sustainable pattern of behavior.
Fedora is that better, sustainable way. It's not elitist, everyone is welcome to participate with the understanding that part of making that choice can involve the giving up some conveniences in the short term in the commitment to the larger goals of a sustainable free software ecosystem. If your not comfortable with that expectation, then we'll warmly let you pass through on your way to another community that will better cater to your desires. But we aren't going to cater to unsustainable convenience food.
And if that principled approach is not the most popular.. it doesn't mean its worth giving up. We need to shake loose the idea that being the most popular matters. What I want is contributor targets to shoot for. I want a clear vision by which we can recruit contributors...not users. Maybe Mike is right and we are going to see a big dip in users when RHEL 6 comes out and people junk to that stable offering. And where he sees a negative. I see success.
We position this project as leading edge. If people have been using Fedora as a forerunner to RHEL 6 and now find they want long term stability...then great. We did exactly what we said we would do for those people and now their needs are such that a stable base makes mroe sense. We are NOT all things to all people. Its GOOD to see people who need stability moving to RHEL instead of asking us to be that as well as leading edge.
And since we don't promise to provide everything to everyone then I fully expect to see a cyclic process in our contributor and user base. I expect to see periods of die-off as well as growrth. I expect that in any system which aims to be sustainable.
The issue for me is are we prepared for the cycle of renewal. Are we prepared to recruit contributors into participating into new leading edge directions?
-jef"Would you like fries with that?"spaleta
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 8:11 PM, Jeff Spaleta jspaleta@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:48 AM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
That's the wrong argument. We all know why we _can't_ make it just work, but that doesn't excuse us.
You are right. The answer is clearly to export US legal rules to the rest of the world so we can have an equally unfriendly playing field.
No thanks ;)
Fix what is broken and not break everything else so that you can pretend that it isn't.
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 10:36 AM, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
Fix what is broken and not break everything else so that you can pretend that it isn't.
Think of that opening remark as a modern twitter-friendly version of "A Modest Proposal" given in the very same spirit of Jonathon Swift's original.
-jef
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 8:56 PM, Jeff Spaleta jspaleta@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 10:36 AM, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
Fix what is broken and not break everything else so that you can pretend that it isn't.
Think of that opening remark as a modern twitter-friendly version of "A Modest Proposal" given in the very same spirit of Jonathon Swift's original.
My mail wasn't really serious ... but well that is not really visible over the internet ;)
Jeff Spaleta (jspaleta@gmail.com) said:
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:48 AM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
That's the wrong argument. We all know why we _can't_ make it just work, but that doesn't excuse us.
You are right. The answer is clearly to export US legal rules to the rest of the world so we can have an equally unfriendly playing field.
That solution boils down to 'contact your senator', as well. Or possibly 'contact your local general.'
Bill
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 10:11 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
And if that principled approach is not the most popular.. it doesn't mean its worth giving up. We need to shake loose the idea that being the most popular matters. What I want is contributor targets to shoot for. I want a clear vision by which we can recruit contributors...not users. Maybe Mike is right and we are going to see a big dip in users when RHEL 6 comes out and people junk to that stable offering. And where he sees a negative. I see success.
We position this project as leading edge. If people have been using Fedora as a forerunner to RHEL 6 and now find they want long term stability...then great. We did exactly what we said we would do for those people and now their needs are such that a stable base makes mroe sense. We are NOT all things to all people. Its GOOD to see people who need stability moving to RHEL instead of asking us to be that as well as leading edge.
And since we don't promise to provide everything to everyone then I fully expect to see a cyclic process in our contributor and user base. I expect to see periods of die-off as well as growrth. I expect that in any system which aims to be sustainable.
The issue for me is are we prepared for the cycle of renewal. Are we prepared to recruit contributors into participating into new leading edge directions?
I don't disagree with you in any of the above, in fact we're saying the same thing from different directions.
Dne 10.5.2010 20:11, Jeff Spaleta napsal(a):
And if that principled approach is not the most popular.. it doesn't mean its worth giving up. We need to shake loose the idea that being the most popular matters.
PREACH IT!!! PREACH IT, BROTHER!!!
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 8:11 PM, Jeff Spaleta jspaleta@gmail.com wrote:
Fedora is that better, sustainable way. It's not elitist, everyone is welcome to participate with the understanding that part of making that choice can involve the giving up some conveniences in the short term in the commitment to the larger goals of a sustainable free software ecosystem. If your not comfortable with that expectation, then we'll warmly let you pass through on your way to another community that will better cater to your desires. But we aren't going to cater to unsustainable convenience food.
And if that principled approach is not the most popular.. it doesn't mean its worth giving up. We need to shake loose the idea that being the most popular matters. What I want is contributor targets to shoot for. I want a clear vision by which we can recruit contributors...not users. Maybe Mike is right and we are going to see a big dip in users when RHEL 6 comes out and people junk to that stable offering. And where he sees a negative. I see success.
We position this project as leading edge. If people have been using Fedora as a forerunner to RHEL 6 and now find they want long term stability...then great. We did exactly what we said we would do for those people and now their needs are such that a stable base makes mroe sense. We are NOT all things to all people. Its GOOD to see people who need stability moving to RHEL instead of asking us to be that as well as leading edge.
And since we don't promise to provide everything to everyone then I fully expect to see a cyclic process in our contributor and user base. I expect to see periods of die-off as well as growrth. I expect that in any system which aims to be sustainable.
The issue for me is are we prepared for the cycle of renewal. Are we prepared to recruit contributors into participating into new leading edge directions?
Thank you very much! I wish i could write as eloquent as you, would make my posts less trollish.
On 05/10/2010 11:18 AM, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 10.5.2010 06:54, Ralf Corsepius napsal(a):
Have you ever talked to Ubuntu/openSUSE users and listened to their replies when telling them you are using Fedora?
You will hear answers along the line of too much inconvenience to get multimedia working, too unstable (in the sense of low MTBF), "I tried Fedora once, but had suffered from xxxx-failures", no usable system-config GUI, ...
I heard these arguments many times and some of them are fair, but some of them just are not ... how less difficult it could be to get multimedia working than clicking on two links
... I know this ... It's them who don't know ... It seems to be a high enough hurdle for some beginners to take and enough reason for to abstain from Fedora ;)
... unfortunately can't avoid having to agree to the "MTBF accusations" and the "xxxx-failures".
Interestingly most of the packages I am personally facing "real malfunctions" in Fedora with, are almost identical to what Ubuntu ships :)
Ralf
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 11:18:54AM +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 10.5.2010 06:54, Ralf Corsepius napsal(a):
Have you ever talked to Ubuntu/openSUSE users and listened to their replies when telling them you are using Fedora?
You will hear answers along the line of too much inconvenience to get multimedia working, too unstable (in the sense of low MTBF), "I tried Fedora once, but had suffered from xxxx-failures", no usable system-config GUI, ...
I heard these arguments many times and some of them are fair, but some of them just are not ... how less difficult it could be to get multimedia working than clicking on two links (http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noa... and http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stab...) and agreeing on the inserting new repository?
and then you get the idea you also want to use nice synaptics package manager and your system is ruined with a few clicks.
I have opend bugs on that in redhat and rpmfusion which apper untouched since than.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=566917
Richard
On 12/05/10 15:19, Richard Zidlicky wrote: --snip--
(http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noa... and http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stab...) and agreeing on the inserting new repository?
and then you get the idea you also want to use nice synaptics package manager and your system is ruined with a few clicks.
I have opend bugs on that in redhat and rpmfusion which apper untouched since than.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=566917
Richard
That could be an rpmfusion problem as remi.repo gets added to synaptic. and is listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/remi.list
Frank
On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 03:25:09PM +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
On 12/05/10 15:19, Richard Zidlicky wrote: --snip--
(http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noa... and http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stab...) and agreeing on the inserting new repository?
and then you get the idea you also want to use nice synaptics package manager and your system is ruined with a few clicks.
I have opend bugs on that in redhat and rpmfusion which apper untouched since than.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=566917
Richard
That could be an rpmfusion problem as remi.repo gets added to synaptic. and is listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/remi.list
there are many places where it could be fixed so I filled an rpmfusion bugzilla report as well. https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1137
Richard
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:34 PM, Gilboa Davara gilboad@gmail.com wrote:
If we, as a -community- project, want to remain relevant, it is time to decide who we are and what is our goal.
Agreed. The who we are is easy answered, we're RHs *playground*. That is what everyone, not completely new to Linux, knows and one problem why we're at 1.3% as mentioned above. Something that other distros don't have to suffer from. And we're gladly acting like it, e.g. x-server not compatible with HW vendor drivers at release time (believe it or not, but users were angry about it). Bleeding edge stuff like PA as first, ready or not for the masses. One of the most frequented link in #fedora was/is http://fedorasolved.org/Members/fenris02/pulseaudio-fixes-and-workarounds Just two examples.
No wonder we're at about 1.3% eh ;)
On Sun, 2010-05-09 at 22:11 +0200, Thomas Janssen wrote:
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:34 PM, Gilboa Davara gilboad@gmail.com wrote:
If we, as a -community- project, want to remain relevant, it is time to decide who we are and what is our goal.
Agreed. The who we are is easy answered, we're RHs *playground*. That is what everyone, not completely new to Linux, knows and one problem why we're at 1.3% as mentioned above. Something that other distros don't have to suffer from. And we're gladly acting like it, e.g. x-server not compatible with HW vendor drivers at release time (believe it or not, but users were angry about it). Bleeding edge stuff like PA as first, ready or not for the masses. One of the most frequented link in #fedora was/is http://fedorasolved.org/Members/fenris02/pulseaudio-fixes-and-workarounds Just two examples.
No wonder we're at about 1.3% eh ;)
I have no problems with being RH playground, nor with the 1.3%. RH puts a lot of resources into Fedora and it entitled to use these resources as they see fit.
Never the less, this "playground" is huge. You can have anything from a extra-unstable Debian-Sid to a Ubuntu-LTS. This big question is: Who we are, and who gets to decide it.
- Gilboa
[Well, sorry for posting again to this subthread, but this particular post has nothing whatsoever to do with hall monitoring. (Time for another new subthread?)]
Thomas Janssen wrote:
And we're gladly acting like it, e.g. x-server not compatible with HW vendor drivers at release time (believe it or not, but users were angry about it).
We do this because this allows providing the newest Free drivers, the ones which we can ship out of the box, which we are comfortable with our users using, which are the way to go in the long run, which we can fix if there are bugs and which just generally tend to work better.
We were the first mainstream distribution providing Free 3D support for ATI Radeon HD cards of the r6xx and r7xx chipset series (see Fedora 12). We are now (with Fedora 13) about to be the first mainstream distribution providing Free 3D support for NVidia hardware.
I really don't want this to stop, nor to lose all the other benefits of the current X.Org X11 release, just to be compatible with crappy proprietary drivers which can't keep up with technology. Instead, we need to make those drivers obsolete, which we're already well on the way to.
Just say NO to proprietary drivers!
We do not and should never support proprietary drivers. Please NEVER withhold a new version of X.Org X11 just because proprietary drivers don't support it!
Kevin Kofler
On 05/10/2010 02:10 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
We do not and should never support proprietary drivers. Please NEVER withhold a new version of X.Org X11 just because proprietary drivers don't support it!
It might not be obvious but doing so is very counter productive even for those users wanting to use proprietary drivers. Nvidia doesn't update their driver everytime there is a new Xorg release. They wait for a major distribution to include it first. If Fedora waits for Nvidia, we will have a chicken and egg situation. Among distribution vendors, Red Hat is by far the leading contributor to Xorg and Fedora benefits very much from the expertise by getting many new features first. It would be silly to throw away that benefit in favour of proprietary driver support.
Rahul
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:20 PM, Rahul Sundaram metherid@gmail.com wrote:
On 05/10/2010 02:10 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
We do not and should never support proprietary drivers. Please NEVER withhold a new version of X.Org X11 just because proprietary drivers don't support it!
It might not be obvious but doing so is very counter productive even for those users wanting to use proprietary drivers. Nvidia doesn't update their driver everytime there is a new Xorg release. They wait for a major distribution to include it first.
Not that I disagree with your post (or Kevin's) but this is (no longer) true, NVIDIA does (try) to follow xserver releases. AMD is not; they have a selected list of distributions that they support, Fedora is *not* one of them.
On Mon, 10 May 2010, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
On 05/10/2010 02:10 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
We do not and should never support proprietary drivers. Please NEVER withhold a new version of X.Org X11 just because proprietary drivers don't support it!
It might not be obvious but doing so is very counter productive even for those users wanting to use proprietary drivers. Nvidia doesn't update their driver everytime there is a new Xorg release. They wait for a major distribution to include it first. If Fedora waits for Nvidia, we will have a chicken and egg situation. Among distribution vendors, Red Hat is by far the leading contributor to Xorg and Fedora benefits very much from the expertise by getting many new features first. It would be silly to throw away that benefit in favour of proprietary driver support.
A suggestion for this thread:
This thread is not about hall monitoring, nor is it about fedora development. It is a meta-issue and would probably be best on the Fedora Advisory Board mailing list than here.
-sv
On Sun, 2010-05-09 at 22:11 +0200, Thomas Janssen wrote:
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:34 PM, Gilboa Davara gilboad@gmail.com wrote:
If we, as a -community- project, want to remain relevant, it is time to decide who we are and what is our goal.
Agreed. The who we are is easy answered, we're RHs *playground*. That is what everyone, not completely new to Linux, knows and one problem why we're at 1.3% as mentioned above. Something that other distros don't have to suffer from. And we're gladly acting like it, e.g. x-server not compatible with HW vendor drivers at release time (believe it or not, but users were angry about it). Bleeding edge stuff like PA as first, ready or not for the masses. One of the most frequented link in #fedora was/is http://fedorasolved.org/Members/fenris02/pulseaudio-fixes-and-workarounds Just two examples.
No wonder we're at about 1.3% eh ;)
I don't agree with that, entirely. Think about it - Red Hat sells big enterprise stuff. Mostly servers. Directly, PA and bleeding edge X stuff isn't of huge immediate interest to RH. I mean, of course RH is going to pay people to work on stuff it thinks will ultimately benefit it, but it does take a rather broad and long view of this (think how long it's taken for PA to even be in RHEL at all). But we are a _general_ 'playground' (or rather sandbox), for the development of interesting and useful bits of technology. I think you can look at Fedora almost as a concept car; we're developing technologies that will be useful in the consumer car of the future, but we're _not_ that car, in a practical sense. We have all the rough edges and bits that won't be practical in the end.
As Kevin says in his reply, I think doing stuff like the above - PA, X devleopment - is a strength of Fedora. It's one of the things we do well, and for which we're valuable. But it doesn't necessarily make for the best end-user general purpose operating system for the present moment in time; we're blazing a trail ahead.
On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 10:16:45PM +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
I don't agree with that, entirely. Think about it - Red Hat sells big enterprise stuff. Mostly servers. Directly, PA and bleeding edge X stuff isn't of huge immediate interest to RH. I mean, of course RH is going to pay people to work on stuff it thinks will ultimately benefit it, but it does take a rather broad and long view of this (think how long it's taken for PA to even be in RHEL at all). But we are a _general_ 'playground' (or rather sandbox), for the development of interesting and useful bits of technology. I think you can look at Fedora almost as a
Not so general. For example grub2 or upstart weren't really pushed. Or initng didn't got much support. There are also choices regarding how well the different desktops are taken into account when a feature is deemed to be integrated enough. My observation is that really new directions and most innovative integration, especially at the level of the basic operating system tasks (kernel, PA, X, policykit, devicekit...), but also for important technologies and applications (firefox, java...) is in general done by redhat people using redhat developped technology. I don't follow the Fedora development very closely anymore, but it seems to me that it was especially true in the past. When it is not an innovation lead by redhat people, it is quite the struggle to get it in -- though it remains possible.
Please note that it is not at all a criticism of RedHat or Fedora, it is just my impression of how things work.
On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 11:09:12 +0100, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
I'm tempted to agree in practice with Matej that it is. I don't think we can kid ourselves that we're doing a particularly good job of making a desktop for end users; if we were, we wouldn't be being trashed by Ubuntu in this area (let alone OS X and Windows). Yes, yes, I know, Ubuntu's statistics are unreliable and all that crap. I know we can all rationalize for ten hours about how it's all Microsoft's fault for being evil and Ubuntu's fault for being good at marketing and users' fault for being stupid and blah de freaking blah.
I don't think Fedora is going to be able to outdo Ubuntu in the general population unless the practice of allowing software patents is stopped. (Or at least exceptions are granted to be compatible with standards or to interoperate with other systems.)
Video support is another big issue that can't be fixed overnight. While some big strides have been made in the last year, there is a lot more work to do. Besides some needing polishing to make things work more generally, there is still a lot of performance work needed for modern (with shaders) video cards. This is an area where getting some more good people could really help Fedora. Despite Redhat already providing a lot of support here, I'd like to see them hire a couple of more good people here to speed up development as I think the impact on the usability of Fedora could be greatly helped by that effort.
On 05/08/2010 01:41 AM, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 7.5.2010 16:56, Przemek Klosowski napsal(a):
It seemed like the combination of best of being completely independent and maintaining your own repository (what would be now called PPA; I haven't heard the term then yet) and having support and community of fellow maintainers all in one package. It was refreshing to see how problems were just solved on the spot without need to apply for permission and a lot of bureaucracy. The result was incredibly rapid development (I remember I was using as an advertisement slogan “Fedora? Next release of your distribution today!”).
:) Agreed, this aspect to a wide extend has gone lost in Fedora.
This vision in my opinion requires freedom for packagers of individual packages to have quite wide allowance in setting their own policies concerning updates and bug fixing. If Kevin prefers to have packages on all distros synchronized and (maybe, I don't know, I don't use KDE) broken much more often than Gnome-folks, it is in my opinion mostly between KDE team and KDE users. Also, if they don't think they can manage much more than pushing all non-packaging bugs upstream, I am not the one who would preach to them they should do better (especially without providing manpower to do so). OTOH, if Ralph doesn't won't to push almost any bug upstream and he wants to make sure that all Fedora bugs are fixed asap, great for his users, they will certainly love him, but I am not sure it should be fixed as a rule for everybody.
Well, my view is a bit different:
I consider it to be a Fedora's package's maintainer's primary task and duty to keep his package "working and functional" in *Fedora*.
To be able to achieve this he is required to bring along a certain amount of technical skills/qualifications. Wrt. this, I am observing deficiencies in Fedora. I feel, there are packagers who consider packaging to be a mechanical task, but who don't actually understand what they are doing.
Part of this "task and duty" is the Fedora maintainer to go after bugs/malfunctions/defects etc." and process them in "adequate time" such that these "bugs/malfunctions etc" do not furtheron affect Fedora users.
How and what to do in detail to achieve this can vary in wide ranges in individual cases. This can be him to investigate an issue and to provide fixes himself, this can be him asking upstream, this can be him arranging a contact between reporter and upstream. The only thing that matters is to keep the impact of such issues low as possible to the Fedora users - In an ideal world, this would be to fix the bug ASAP.
In real world, processing such issues often works entirely different. It may easily comprise to release major package upgrades midst of a distro's life-cycle, even ABI/APi breaking ones, occasionally to backport selected fixes, or ... not to upgrade or in extreme cases, to remove or downgrade packages.
In short: Being religous about any of these details doesn't help anyone. Neither "let users report bugs upstream" nor "no backports" nor "no ABI/API breaking upgrades" nor "strictly follow upstream releases" will work everywhere on all occasions.
Or yet differently: The user and his experience with the packages a packager maintains should be in the focus of a packager's works.
Ralf
2010/5/7 Matěj Cepl mcepl@redhat.com:
Dne 7.5.2010 01:01, Rudolf Kastl napsal(a):
one of the questions raised in the meeting posted by mcepl was... "why dont those people leave if they are unhappy". simple... they put alot sweat blood and tears into a project, and they have friends... with the development crowd and with the community in general. they are obviously feeling as a part of it with just a different pov and an own opinion. that isnt bad at all ... but healthy... "diversity is healthy" to a project.
I didn't to continue in this thread, but here I have to defend myself. I don't remember I would say anything like that, but it looks to me like taken out of the context at least and expressing exactly opposite position I think I held. Although I don't agree with many of them in a lot of places, I strongly support Kevin's, Ralf's and others position that the current development is very harmful to the development of Fedora and I would love them to stay and defend this still nice project we all work on.
i didnt mean you said that. i was referring to the meeting log you posted.
sorry for the confusion.
kind regards, Rudolf Kastl
Actually, http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/dissidents/ made me so angry that I am just not able to write any response to it ... whatever I would write would be too much personal half-libelous attack, so I will rather write nothing.
Matěj
-- According to the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, spirituality is not for people who are trying to avoid hell; it is for people who have been through hell. In many ways, spirituality is about what we do with our pain. And the truth is, if we don't transform it, we will transmit it. -- Al Gustafson
-- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Dne 7.5.2010 00:45, Brian Pepple napsal(a):
Please enlighten me then on what new information was added to this thread that wasn't in the prior thread that warranted keeping it alive?
Could you point out in https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Hall_Monitor_Policy where it says "thread should be closed when it doesn't contain any new information"? I think we've almost got to pretty civil version of discussion about some fundamental issues in Fedora project (which would be *VERY* new). Oh well.
Matěj
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Karel Zak wrote:
On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 05:46:21PM -0400, Brian Pepple wrote:
On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 23:22 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 6.5.2010 12:28, Karel Zak napsal(a):
Thank you for pointing out yet another undemocratic policy passed by one of
+1 The Hall Monitor Policy is cancer.
+1000 it feels to me like in a bad old Communism when the open debate was allowed only when it didn't touch the leading role of the Communist Party. I really don't think anybody in this thread said anything so sacrilegious that the thread should be terminated.
Normally, I'd be against it killing a thread, but the thread that started this discussion had already been done awhile back and this new thread added *nothing* new to the discussion. Frankly, it was more
This all is your subjective opinion. There is not objective and unbiased way how evaluate any discussion, it's unmeasurable.
I don't agree. There are logical ways to measure this. e.g.
N people participate in a thread. -> (N/2)+1 of them complains to the moderator -> the thread gets closed.
But since the number of complaints in this case was 3 only, closing the thread did not make any sense.
Orcan
2010/5/6 Orcan Ogetbil oget.fedora@gmail.com
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Karel Zak wrote:
On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 05:46:21PM -0400, Brian Pepple wrote:
On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 23:22 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 6.5.2010 12:28, Karel Zak napsal(a):
Thank you for pointing out yet another undemocratic policy passed by one of
+1 The Hall Monitor Policy is cancer.
+1000 it feels to me like in a bad old Communism when the open debate was allowed only when it didn't touch the leading role of the Communist Party. I really don't think anybody in this thread said anything so sacrilegious that the thread should be terminated.
Normally, I'd be against it killing a thread, but the thread that started this discussion had already been done awhile back and this new thread added *nothing* new to the discussion. Frankly, it was more
This all is your subjective opinion. There is not objective and unbiased way how evaluate any discussion, it's unmeasurable.
I don't agree. There are logical ways to measure this. e.g.
N people participate in a thread. -> (N/2)+1 of them complains to the moderator -> the thread gets closed.
But since the number of complaints in this case was 3 only, closing the thread did not make any sense.
I believe that these long discussions will end only when there is a better way of communication (and interaction) between the various contributors of the Fedora Project, Fedora Board and FESCO. Anything that diminishes that sense of "we decide, you do."
-- Henrique "LonelySpooky" Junior
On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 07:53:52PM -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Karel Zak wrote:
On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 05:46:21PM -0400, Brian Pepple wrote:
On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 23:22 +0200, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Dne 6.5.2010 12:28, Karel Zak napsal(a):
Thank you for pointing out yet another undemocratic policy passed by one of
+1 The Hall Monitor Policy is cancer.
+1000 it feels to me like in a bad old Communism when the open debate was allowed only when it didn't touch the leading role of the Communist Party. I really don't think anybody in this thread said anything so sacrilegious that the thread should be terminated.
Normally, I'd be against it killing a thread, but the thread that started this discussion had already been done awhile back and this new thread added *nothing* new to the discussion. Frankly, it was more
This all is your subjective opinion. There is not objective and unbiased way how evaluate any discussion, it's unmeasurable.
I don't agree. There are logical ways to measure this. e.g.
N people participate in a thread. -> (N/2)+1 of them complains to the moderator -> the thread gets closed.
Why people in (N/2)+1 group read the thread? Masochism?
Why do you think that the thread is interesting only for people who participate in the thread? We have many passive readers.
I think old good "Don't feed trolls!" is better than arbitrary attempt to implement censorship.
Karel
Burying the underlying issue yet again under the carpet or "Hall monitoring" it wont resolve it neither will a shouting contest between people do. People will need leave all emotion behind and look neutrally at each other point of view and listen to each other constructive criticism to gradually build up and achieve a compromised solution between themselves and all parties involved.
Everyone knows the underlying issue that dissatisfies so many of the community ( otherwise Kevin would never been elected to FESCo ) and to resolve that issue the board needs to step back and look at the project in whole, it's members, where it is and where it wants it to be and coming up with a clear cut vision of what the project is going to achieve and who they are trying to attract while achieving that goal.
As long as the project vision remains clouded and is sending out mixed signals the underlying issue will never be resolved and will leave contributors stuck in a Groundhog day unable to move on either within this project or to another one and the same issue will continue to re-surface release cycle after release cycle gradually increasing the disruption and the rift in the community.
JBG
2010/5/7 "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" johannbg@hi.is:
Burying the underlying issue yet again under the carpet or "Hall monitoring" it wont resolve it neither will a shouting contest between people do. People will need leave all emotion behind and look neutrally at each other point of view and listen to each other constructive criticism to gradually build up and achieve a compromised solution between themselves and all parties involved.
Everyone knows the underlying issue that dissatisfies so many of the community ( otherwise Kevin would never been elected to FESCo ) and to resolve that issue the board needs to step back and look at the project in whole, it's members, where it is and where it wants it to be and coming up with a clear cut vision of what the project is going to achieve and who they are trying to attract while achieving that goal.
As long as the project vision remains clouded and is sending out mixed signals the underlying issue will never be resolved and will leave contributors stuck in a Groundhog day unable to move on either within this project or to another one and the same issue will continue to re-surface release cycle after release cycle gradually increasing the disruption and the rift in the community.
It's quite easy. First of all there's obviously the need for a poll what our users really want. Since a lot people think our users want another openSUSE/Ubuntu, why not find out what they really want in the first place. Make a scientific poll. I have to say scientific since the last thread showed that the ones who want to change Fedora completely away from what it is, don't believe a non-scientific poll.
Speaking of the handful of people who want another openSUSE/Ubuntu. Have they ever thought about how many downloads Fedora has? That Fedora is since a long time with "adventurous" updates? That Fedora grows from users *not* satisfied with exactly the system where they want it to be? I can say that because i'm one of them. If my former distro would have been that close to the edge (getting the latest and greatest KDE in released versions) like Fedora is (was that time) i wouldn't have changed to Fedora. The blue color and a fancy hat is no reason at all.
The best thing that happened lately, was the plan to test updates better to prevent bad breakage. Of course it wont catch any bug. But it is obviously needed. And i don't say it's because of some bad dissidents break it (really a horribly blog post Seth), but it's because of we're all just humans and stuff happens. So if we can find at least the real show stopper before they get out as updates, we're close to perfect.
So FAB, if you want to do something, do it right. Check out why our users use Fedora. For sure not because they search for another distro already on the market. And if this is no democracy, then don't speak of visions, don't confuse our contributors, then speak as expected from you.
I hope one or the other might get something positiv out of this post. People who laugh about it, i'm glad that i at least made your day.
On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 17:46 -0400, Brian Pepple wrote:
Normally, I'd be against it killing a thread, but the thread that started this discussion had already been done awhile back and this new thread added *nothing* new to the discussion. Frankly, it was more deserving to be on Slashdot more than the fedora-devel list. The Hall Monitors were totally justified in killing this one imo, and frankly if folks want more repetitive flame-bait threads like that I've got zero interest in staying subscribed to it.
I'm not actually particularly interested in whether this is true or not. What worries me is that it was always my understanding, and I think the understanding of others, that the hall monitoring policy does not grant hall monitors the power to shut down threads they judge to be repetitive. My understanding is it should only grant them the power to shut down threads which violate the 'be excellent to each other' motto - i.e., it's about the civility of the discussion, not the subject matter.
Whether shutting down repetitive threads is a good idea and they _should_ have that power is a separate question; even if you think they should, it's surely not appropriate for them to exercise that power before it's actually been duly granted.
(if you go to the policy to check this, you may be surprised to notice it's suddenly sprouted the following section:
"In addition to non-excellent individual behavior, there can be occasions where a mailing list thread gets "out of hand", and is no longer productive. While simply being a long thread is not a problem, threads with a limited number of people, repeating their same stances over and over again with no forward progress, are also not beneficial, and detract from healthy discussion.
* Hall monitors are allowed to send 'thread closure' posts to threads that, after 50 or more messages, do not appear to be making any forward progress. When this is done the subject line of the message will be prefixed with [HALL-MONITORED] and a link to this wiki page is included in the message. This is intended to spur thread participants to re-focus their discussion in productive manners, ideally in new and smaller topic-specific threads."
This seems to have been added 'for review' yesterday, which to me is a rather odd approach for a policy which is already in practical use, however much the top of the page claims it to be a 'draft'. Proposed changes for review should happen elsewhere, not in the 'production copy' of the policy. But never mind. For the purposes of this email, please refer to the policy as it existed when the thread was monitored, before the above addition.)
On 05/07/2010 03:05 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 17:46 -0400, Brian Pepple wrote:
Normally, I'd be against it killing a thread, but the thread that started this discussion had already been done awhile back and this new thread added *nothing* new to the discussion. Frankly, it was more deserving to be on Slashdot more than the fedora-devel list. The Hall Monitors were totally justified in killing this one imo, and frankly if folks want more repetitive flame-bait threads like that I've got zero interest in staying subscribed to it.
I'm not actually particularly interested in whether this is true or not. What worries me is that it was always my understanding, and I think the understanding of others, that the hall monitoring policy does not grant hall monitors the power to shut down threads they judge to be repetitive. My understanding is it should only grant them the power to shut down threads which violate the 'be excellent to each other' motto - i.e., it's about the civility of the discussion, not the subject matter.
The problem with this distinction is that in some cases the very act of bringing something up again *isn't* civil.
That being said, I think the Hall Monitor concept is pretty awful.
On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 20:05 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
(if you go to the policy to check this, you may be surprised to notice it's suddenly sprouted the following section:
"In addition to non-excellent individual behavior, there can be occasions where a mailing list thread gets "out of hand", and is no longer productive. [...]
This would appear to be the action from the recent board meeting:
https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-board-meeting/2010-05-06/fedora_boa...
This seems to have been added 'for review' yesterday, which to me is a rather odd approach for a policy which is already in practical use, however much the top of the page claims it to be a 'draft'. Proposed changes for review should happen elsewhere, not in the 'production copy' of the policy.
FWIW, I agree.
What worries me is that it was always my understanding, and I think the understanding of others, that the hall monitoring policy does not grant hall monitors the power to shut down threads they judge to be repetitive. My understanding is it should only grant them the power to shut down threads which violate the 'be excellent to each other' motto - i.e., it's about the civility of the discussion, not the subject matter.
Whether shutting down repetitive threads is a good idea and they _should_ have that power is a separate question; even if you think they should, it's surely not appropriate for them to exercise that power before it's actually been duly granted.
The board meeting log suggests that they intended the policy to have the broader goal of keeping the discussion "constructive". I'm not sure to what degree the policy can be considered something to follow by letter, independently of its intent.
(BTW, John Poelstra made two more revisions to the policy 20 minutes ago.)
Matt McCutchen said the following on 05/07/2010 01:41 PM Pacific Time:
On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 20:05 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
(if you go to the policy to check this, you may be surprised to notice it's suddenly sprouted the following section:
"In addition to non-excellent individual behavior, there can be occasions where a mailing list thread gets "out of hand", and is no longer productive. [...]
This would appear to be the action from the recent board meeting:
https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-board-meeting/2010-05-06/fedora_boa...
This seems to have been added 'for review' yesterday, which to me is a rather odd approach for a policy which is already in practical use, however much the top of the page claims it to be a 'draft'. Proposed changes for review should happen elsewhere, not in the 'production copy' of the policy.
FWIW, I agree.
What worries me is that it was always my understanding, and I think the understanding of others, that the hall monitoring policy does not grant hall monitors the power to shut down threads they judge to be repetitive. My understanding is it should only grant them the power to shut down threads which violate the 'be excellent to each other' motto - i.e., it's about the civility of the discussion, not the subject matter.
Whether shutting down repetitive threads is a good idea and they _should_ have that power is a separate question; even if you think they should, it's surely not appropriate for them to exercise that power before it's actually been duly granted.
The board meeting log suggests that they intended the policy to have the broader goal of keeping the discussion "constructive". I'm not sure to what degree the policy can be considered something to follow by letter, independently of its intent.
(BTW, John Poelstra made two more revisions to the policy 20 minutes ago.)
Correct. He was following up on an action item he took from the meeting which was to draft up some clear objectives for having the policy in the first place :)
John
On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 20:05 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
What worries me is that it was always my understanding, and I think the understanding of others, that the hall monitoring policy does not grant hall monitors the power to shut down threads they judge to be repetitive. My understanding is it should only grant them the power to shut down threads which violate the 'be excellent to each other' motto - i.e., it's about the civility of the discussion, not the subject matter.
The thread was repetitive from a thread that had been shut down because it had degenerated way past "be excellent to each other", and seemingly was restarted explicitly to incite more flames, misinformation and hatred. The only thing I found objectionable was that it was allowed to last _so_ _long_ before being killed. Hopefully, in the future, if a thread is hall monitored the people who were the main reason it got out of control won't be allowed to wait a few weeks, change the subject and start it back up.
Dne 8.5.2010 07:33, James Antill napsal(a):
The thread was repetitive from a thread that had been shut down because it had degenerated way past "be excellent to each other", and seemingly was restarted explicitly to incite more flames, misinformation and hatred.
What if, somebody is not happy about a discussion degraded into personal attacks, but feels that the issue at hand was never resolved properly. So he sits down and writes as plainly as he can (BTW, notice that Kevin is not native English speaker, not trying to imply it is the case here, just that we should cut each other some slack ... there are many people with ESL in the Fedora project). He feels personally hurt by the previous actions, so he writes in quite personal tone. And he is immediately shut down, because we have already settled this issue (well, we haven't, the discussion was just shut down, but it is convenient to pretend we did). How is that being excellent to each other?
Matěj
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 16:01 -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
Clarification please, how does redundancy fit under the Hall Monitor Policy?
The basis of the Hall Monitor Policy is:
The Fedora Board has adopted a simple motto for general behavior as a member of the Fedora Project. It is simply "Be excellent to each other".
There doesn't seem to be any lack of courtesy present in the thread yet. So it doesn't seem to fall under the current policy. If "signal to noise" is a valid reason for hall monitoring it should be added to the policy through the appropriate process.
* Hall monitors are allowed to send 'thread closure' posts toaggressive or problematic mailing list threads to curtail issues before they become serious enough to warrant an official warning. When this is done the subject line of the message will be prefixed with [HALL-MONITORED] and a link to this wiki page is included in the message.
That doesn't read, to me, like it was written to mean 'hall monitors can choose to close any thread at their own discretion'. To me it simply reads like a process point, saying that 'when a thread looks like it should be monitored *for one of the specified reasons*, hall monitors can choose to send a 'thread closure' post rather than move straight to an official warning'.
At least, that's how I always assumed it was intended when the policy came in, and I'm not at all sure I'm okay with a policy which says 'hall monitors can shut down any discussion they choose for any reason they like'.
On 05/03/2010 10:01 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
Of course the sample is biased. It's a sample of people who frequent the forums, that's a self selecting group of people, by no means a worthwhile representation of the Fedora user base as a whole.
FYI - Not true - I joined the forum for the sole purpose of voting in that poll - everyone I know who voted joined the forum for the same reason. The mailling list brought it to my attention.
We all follow the mailing lists - as presumably does FESCO - so the sample is less biased than is being suggested.
FESCO is not voted in by Aunt Tilly ... are they?
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 9:13 PM, Mail Llists lists@sapience.com wrote:
On 05/03/2010 10:01 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
Of course the sample is biased. It's a sample of people who frequent the forums, that's a self selecting group of people, by no means a worthwhile representation of the Fedora user base as a whole.
FYI - Not true - I joined the forum for the sole purpose of voting in that poll - everyone I know who voted joined the forum for the same reason. The mailling list brought it to my attention.
Actually what you did is considered the classic example of skewing the data by self-selection at this point it is no longer polling but 'voting'. It is the reason why many polls will say 'unscientific survey' when done this way... you can not apply standard tests and get answers that would be found scientifically valid.
For a poll to be statistically valid, the population must be randomly polled. The population polled may be a 'self-selected' target (eg those who have registered to vote versus the general population) but it needs to be a semi-closed set. [EG polling surveys of registered voters after the deadline to register is considered to be more accurate than before so because the population will not suddenly grow afterwords.]
Listen, I would have to say this no matter what the survey came out was. It was seriously flawed in ways that make using it worse than having no data at all. It also makes it harder to do a proper survey because of the emotional baggage that various people have attached for or against the first one.
We all follow the mailing lists - as presumably does FESCO - so the sample is less biased than is being suggested.
FESCO is not voted in by Aunt Tilly ... are they?
They aren't voted in. The range voting method does not vote people in or out.. it determines who the majority of people are most likely to 'live' with. Basically it tries to remove the emotional political ends and find who the 'silent' majority want. How much it does that is dependant on other factors but that is what it (and the Debian voting system) aim for.
In the end, being elected by a range vote is less of a mandate than an acceptance.
Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
They aren't voted in. The range voting method does not vote people in or out.. it determines who the majority of people are most likely to 'live' with. Basically it tries to remove the emotional political ends and find who the 'silent' majority want. How much it does that is dependant on other factors but that is what it (and the Debian voting system) aim for.
I wonder how strong this effect really is. I think many of us are giving degenerate all-or-0 votes, I know I am.
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
They aren't voted in. The range voting method does not vote people in or out.. it determines who the majority of people are most likely to 'live' with. Basically it tries to remove the emotional political ends and find who the 'silent' majority want. How much it does that is dependant on other factors but that is what it (and the Debian voting system) aim for.
I wonder how strong this effect really is. I think many of us are giving degenerate all-or-0 votes, I know I am.
From the math, and the people I asked to look at it.. the all or
nothings round out the extremes so it is harder to push a candidate that the majority would not find acceptable.
I am not a fan of range voting. I don't like the complexity but I will agree that it looks for a way to remove extreme partisanship from elections. It does not remove partisanship after an election, and I think that it requires like all things a motivated electorate: motivated to run and motivated to vote.
In any democracy it takes more than one person to make large changes (one person on a board, etc). And it takes more than marches, flurries of emails, and polls. It takes time and compromise to persuade others and bring about any lasting change... and that change will not ever be as radical as some would like it.
From what I have studied of human history and psychology this seems to
be about how it always works. Groups grow more change averse over time, and those that do not fit in must move to the frontiers to find new places to work out their energy. Eventually though they too become the status quo that some other group will fight against.
On 05/03/2010 10:01 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 01:58 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
It was none of that. All it gave us was info we already had. Some users would like more adventurous stuff, while some users would not. We already had that information, the poll told us nothing new.
Now you may try to argue that the sample is biased, but you have no actual evidence towards that.
Of course the sample is biased. It's a sample of people who frequent the forums, that's a self selecting group of people, by no means a worthwhile representation of the Fedora user base as a whole.
Besides the statistical bias, I think this poll is flawed because it is sensitive to how the issue is worded, and even how people perceive the question; it's like those 'push polls' in politics. Consider those three formulations (*):
- would you like more adventurous stuff in Fedora, to take advantage of improvements and fixes in the installed software
- would you like more adventurous stuff, even if it sometimes introduced regressions
- knowing that sooner or later it will totally break your system, would you like more adventurous stuff
The results will be different for each question. They will also strongly depend on the cohort you will be asking. I am convinced that general users will be more conservative than the Fedora developers, who might answer 'yes' even to the third question, because they know enough to have a fighting chance to recover their systems.
An average user wants a stable, working software distribution, with prompt patches and software enhancements. Since in general those are conflicting requirements, the Fedora community has to apply engineering judgement on what is the appropriate velocity of updates. I personally like the processes and infrastructure that Fedora built to manage the updates, even though I have seen that they don't prevent broken software from getting in. My conclusion is to make it better, not jettison it.
p
(*) I tried to bias the wording to show the range of possible interpretation, so please don't call me out on trolling. The third formulation, while admittedly alarmist, isn't completely unrealistic: c.f. the recent scary bug with a localization interaction that ended up removing large amount of packages, including yum IIRC.
Przemek Klosowski wrote:
An average user wants a stable, working software distribution, with prompt patches and software enhancements. Since in general those are conflicting requirements, the Fedora community has to apply engineering judgement on what is the appropriate velocity of updates. I personally like the processes and infrastructure that Fedora built to manage the updates, even though I have seen that they don't prevent broken software from getting in. My conclusion is to make it better, not jettison it.
The thing is, the Board's "vision" is NOT to keep things as they are, they want to make us much more conservative.
Kevin Kofler
Jesse Keating wrote:
Bad data is worse than no data.
I disagree. As "bad" as the data is, it can't be worse than claiming users want, or worse, "need", conservative updates without any evidence whatsoever as has been done!
In fact I can bring you non-statistical evidence for the opposite: There is already a distribution which works the way people suggested (releases every 6 months, does not upgrade their stable releases to new upstream releases). It's called "Ubuntu". People who want such a system are already happily using Ubuntu, why would they want to use Fedora (which currently does NOT work this way)? People are using Fedora because they are NOT happy with what Ubuntu is doing. Therefore, the results of the poll didn't surprise me in the least.
Of course the sample is biased. It's a sample of people who frequent the forums, that's a self selecting group of people, by no means a worthwhile representation of the Fedora user base as a whole.
Sure, it's a self-selecting group of people, but there's no evidence that the result is not representative. Only better data could prove that claim.
Proper scientific data collection is hard, really hard. To do it right would take a lot of time and engineering and even argument. I don't want to put in that time,
Of course you don't. It would keep you from arbitrary claiming that "users want" or even "need" exactly what YOU personally want. Sure, let's not get those nasty FACTS get in the way of our dictatorship, eh?
nor do I think we could ever be able to truly have a good representation as we have no hard data on who all uses Fedora, and in which ways.
Then imperfect data is what you'll have to work with.
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 19:25 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
Bad data is worse than no data.
I disagree. As "bad" as the data is, it can't be worse than claiming users want, or worse, "need", conservative updates without any evidence whatsoever as has been done!
Wrong. There was data, on this very list, of users who desired more conservative updates. There was also evidence on IRC of more users who felt the same. I'd say there is the same quality of data.
In fact I can bring you non-statistical evidence for the opposite: There is already a distribution which works the way people suggested (releases every 6 months, does not upgrade their stable releases to new upstream releases). It's called "Ubuntu". People who want such a system are already happily using Ubuntu, why would they want to use Fedora (which currently does NOT work this way)? People are using Fedora because they are NOT happy with what Ubuntu is doing. Therefore, the results of the poll didn't surprise me in the least.
Ubuntu's update strategy and policy is far far more strict than what has been proposed here. If you actually read it, you'd understand that. Also if you think that the only difference between Fedora and Ubuntu is our update strategy, then you've really got some problems.
Of course the sample is biased. It's a sample of people who frequent the forums, that's a self selecting group of people, by no means a worthwhile representation of the Fedora user base as a whole.
Sure, it's a self-selecting group of people, but there's no evidence that the result is not representative. Only better data could prove that claim.
Absence of evidence is not evidence itself. That'd be argumentum ad ignoratiam, a logical fallacy. What we have is neither evidence that it is representative, nor evidence that it is not representative. Therefor the data cannot be used for either.
Proper scientific data collection is hard, really hard. To do it right would take a lot of time and engineering and even argument. I don't want to put in that time,
Of course you don't. It would keep you from arbitrary claiming that "users want" or even "need" exactly what YOU personally want. Sure, let's not get those nasty FACTS get in the way of our dictatorship, eh?
Actually it wouldn't. I have hard proof that some users want and need a more conservative approach to updates. We also have hard proof that some users don't. We don't have any proof as to which is a "larger" group of our user base. We cannot make a decision based on that value. Instead we can make a decision based on which type of user we'd like to target, whether we have those users now (which we do have some) or whether we'd like to get more of those users in the future. Our leadership can decide what approach to take, and which users to target.
nor do I think we could ever be able to truly have a good representation as we have no hard data on who all uses Fedora, and in which ways.
Then imperfect data is what you'll have to work with.
Kevin Kofler
On 05/04/2010 02:00 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
Wrong. There was data, on this very list, of users who desired more conservative updates. There was also evidence on IRC of more users who felt the same. I'd say there is the same quality of data
It's an interesting commentary on history to note the following facts: 1.) The more progressive a society is, the greater the relative wealth/abundance of the society. 2.) As a society ages, it grows more conservative. 3.) As a society grows more conservative, the relative, observable stagnation quickly follows
Stagnation has begun in the Fedora community.
Lyos Gemini Norezel
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 5:58 PM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
Please stop banding about the forum poll as if it were some sort of scientific measure with meaningful results one could use as a basis for decision making.
It's the best data we have.
And the statisticians I know say that some data is usually much worse than no data at all. When we used to go about poll data in class, the professors used a training story like this:
Get on a motorcycle. Drive 40 miles per hour. Spit in the direction you are going in. Do it multiple times just to be sure. From that data give the direction of the wind for the countryside. Unless the wind is very very strong and your methods of getting the data very stringent, the best your poll will tell you is that 'the wind' was towards your face. It doesn't matter if at rest the wind was to your back.
The poll has the following problems: 1) self selected pool of subjects being polled (who voted versus who did not. were the people polled or did anyone who could poll themselves) 2) unknown controls on who was polled versus who wasn't. (how many times did someone vote multiple times, how strong can you confirm that) 3) how neutral were the questions and how many ways were the questions asked so that language biases were tested?
Any one of those can invalidate the mathematical tests you say to run as they require random pools, controls on populations polled, and non-leading questions. People keep telling you this and you seem to keep ignoring it.
At best what you can say is the following:
183 people who use the Fedora Forum expressed their opinions on X,Y,Z questions. 78% of those people voted for X and 22% voted for Y. Due to methodologies the level of uncertainty is not easily quantifiable making it unknown how it represents the general population. Further study and better testing methodologies are required.
I would say the same thing if the votes had been the other way.. and people were harping that this proved that slow updates was what people wanted.
Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
Any one of those can invalidate the mathematical tests you say to run as they require random pools, controls on populations polled, and non-leading questions. People keep telling you this and you seem to keep ignoring it.
I know the poll is far from perfect. But it is the best we have and it is a better basis for decision than somebody's guess which has no roots in reality at all.
And unlike your motorcycle example, there is no provable bias into either direction. All you can say is that the results MAY be false due to imperfect methodology, you can't prove they are.
Kevin Kofler
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 11:14 AM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
Any one of those can invalidate the mathematical tests you say to run as they require random pools, controls on populations polled, and non-leading questions. People keep telling you this and you seem to keep ignoring it.
I know the poll is far from perfect. But it is the best we have and it is a better basis for decision than somebody's guess which has no roots in reality at all.
And unlike your motorcycle example, there is no provable bias into either direction. All you can say is that the results MAY be false due to imperfect methodology, you can't prove they are.
I am sorry, but I was confused. You said you would compute p-value tests, but those are only really valuable if you have over a 90% confidence level in the data. Using a non-random sampling polling method which the forum comes in.. I was advised that the best confidence level one could have was 60% with it probably being more like 50%. At this point your +/- % is about 50% also.
At this point, what I can say about the survey is that somewhere between 1% to 100% of people want 'adventurous updates'. And between 1% and 100% do not. Yes the number 78% looks really strong but the confidence in it is so low that it could just as easily have been 22% .. and just as been accurate.
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 4:01 PM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
As I have pointed out in both public and private emails to you
[snip]
Why are you telling all this stuff to me? I'm ALREADY complaining about our processes being undemocratic. The points you make are very real. But I don't agree with you that the solution has to be some formal framework. If our representatives actually, well, REPRESENTED their electorate, things would work much better. Now of course none of the representatives knows who voted for them because the vote is anonymous, but as you explained, there are reasons to represent even those who did not vote for oneself, or at all, anyway.
I have been telling you because I had hoped you would listen and realize you were not just tilting at windmills but the wrong ones. However it is clear to me that I am not able to communicate with you or understand what you are trying to represent. After a year of posting, all I can make out is some sort of quest towards some sort of Anarchy/Anti-statist government in a place where it has little possibility of occurring.
In some cases, the people to represent are even our users, e.g. they asked for "adventurous" updates, so why does the Board decide on a "vision" for conservative updates? Are people that set on their personal preference that they can't see that our users want something different?
When less than 50% of the population votes, everyone can claim they represent the silent majority. And no, a set of emails to a mailing list does not make you non-silent. Hard work and continual effort is what counts in the long run. So in the end, elected members have to vote what they see best. If those views are not what the 'majority' believes to be right they will be voted out.
2010/5/4 Stephen John Smoogen smooge@gmail.com:
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 4:01 PM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
As I have pointed out in both public and private emails to you
[snip]
Why are you telling all this stuff to me? I'm ALREADY complaining about our processes being undemocratic. The points you make are very real. But I don't agree with you that the solution has to be some formal framework. If our representatives actually, well, REPRESENTED their electorate, things would work much better. Now of course none of the representatives knows who voted for them because the vote is anonymous, but as you explained, there are reasons to represent even those who did not vote for oneself, or at all, anyway.
I have been telling you because I had hoped you would listen and realize you were not just tilting at windmills but the wrong ones. However it is clear to me that I am not able to communicate with you or understand what you are trying to represent. After a year of posting, all I can make out is some sort of quest towards some sort of Anarchy/Anti-statist government in a place where it has little possibility of occurring.
if someone opposes some enforced order it doesent make him necasserily and anarchist...
and as long as people in general need someone to vote and decide for them, we are still in the social and educational stone age.
kind regards, Rudolf Kastl
On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 00:01:24 +0200, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Why are you telling all this stuff to me? I'm ALREADY complaining about our processes being undemocratic. The points you make are very real. But I don't agree with you that the solution has to be some formal framework. If our representatives actually, well, REPRESENTED their electorate, things would work much better. Now of course none of the representatives knows who voted for them because the vote is anonymous, but as you explained, there are reasons to represent even those who did not vote for oneself, or at all, anyway.
I disagree, that that is the correct way to run a democratic republic. That is how most politicans work in the USA. They are more interested in getting elected than leading. They run polls continuously during election cycles so that they know what to tell voters.
As a voter this sucks. You have no idea what such a person is going to do after getting elected, as they follow the whim of the polls.
I'd much rather have a set of candidates say up front where they want to lead people and then decide which one gets to lead based on a vote. There are a few politicians who work this way in the USA, but not many.
That's not to say a politician can't change their opinion based on new information, but cases where they do should be rare.
I think people running for leadership positions for Fedora should actually lead and not just go along with the poll of the day.
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