[Fwd: Fedora & openSUSE meeting / cooperation ?]

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Luis Villa schrieb:
> On 2/6/07, Christopher Blizzard <blizzard at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Luis Villa wrote:
> [...]
>> Our current system of centralized distribution _and_ information about
>> what's available seems to make that harder.  i.e. the only way that
>> people can find software that's compatible with Fedora is to find it in
>> Fedora's repositories.  It's something that has scaled well for us with
>> free software,
> It makes it hard for people who are producing free software as well,
> since even if you can guarantee that all of your software is available
> on all distros, it is impossible to quickly get bugfixes and new
> versions out to users on all distros.

I think the answer should be: as upstream maintainer get involved or at
least in contact with the distributions. That's why I'd like to see
upstream maintainers as co-maintainers in Fedora if possible.

<dreaming>Another possible solution: all (important) software agrees to
use a similar, time based release scheme. E.g. everyone releases a
stable version twice a year (March and September) and applies only
bugfixes to the stable versions, while the devel stuff gets into the
devel repo. The distributions could then push the updates to the stable
distribution and the devel version to their devel tree, that gets a
release in April and October. In other words: let the whole world aligns
to the gnome release model and its foreseeable schedule</dreaming>

> I think this is the problem
> suse's build system is trying to fix- release one tarball, upload it
> to their system, *poof*, you've got builds for everything that you can
> point your users at.

And I tend to think: that's not possible (or very very hard). The
software packages in our distribution often has heavy
inter-dependencies. So if you update one, then chances are high to break
something else. Just take Firefox (galeon, liferia, yelp, several more
use exactly the firefox version for which it was build), or gaim (some
plugins like otr, libnotify) for example (there are a lot more), that
are used by several other packages.

Then there are situations where one bug in packages foo and bar gets
fixed with a update of package baz, but another one introduced in
package foobar (the recent gtk2 update for FC6 for example, that broke
drag and drop in thunderbird and firefox). Read: a lot of PITA, which I
remember from the pre-Extras days (when you had to mix repos for add-on
stuff), that still happens now and then these days in 3rd pary add-on
repos that ship stuff Fedora can't ship.

So IMHO the the distributor has to make sure people get what they want.
My preferred solution for now would be two have different update
channels: One that gets only "Security fixes and crucial bug fixes" (so
more careful then Fedora Core currently), one that gets new versions of
most package (rolling release, similar like Extras was, so a bit more
bold then Fedora Core currently), while the crucial new stuff (new
python for example) gets developed in the devel repository.

Just my 2 cent.

CU
thl