question for board members

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Michael Schwendt <bugs.michael at gmx.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 7 May 2010 09:47:28 -0500, Matt wrote:
>
>
> Is it "less shame" due to the number of packagers? Or is it "less shame"
> because the package collection contains a larger number of less popular
> packages, which don't have a big impact if they break? I think it's the
> latter. The Fedora package collection contains software, which simply
> isn't used anywhere by Fedora users, and which sometimes doesn't even
> install or work at all, because not even the package owner uses the
> software on all dist releases.

I think you will have a lot of agreement from people who maybe 2 or 3
years ago were also in the category of "Fedora isn't useful if its not
got as many packages as Debian." How much of our growth over the last
4 years has been due to this mind game collectively we have gotten
into that if we don't have the most users, the most developers, the
most packages we aren't successful or good enough?


>> [...] get the quality reputation back where it's historically been.
>
> The "development period" is where to work towards that. Fedora suffers
> more from Gold releases not being ready -- and being in need of a series
> of bug-fix updates -- than from ordinary maintenance updates making it worse.

>From reading a ton of posts in the last year, I do not know how much
of it is because people think it doesn't matter because we can always
bug fix it later or because we don't spend enough time testing it in
the first place.. or both because they seem part and parcel of each
other. If enough developers think that having a big fat internet
connection is a requirement to use Fedora so you can get continual bug
fixes.. then the idea of having a working Gold release goes away,
because every day is Gold day. And if enough people don't think that
testing is important because it will be fixed later... it just feeds
the cycle.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
“The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.""
— Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines