Two-Week Atomic actual deliverables

[Victor Costan]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 12:59 PM, Adam Miller <maxamillion at fedoraproject.org
> wrote:

> I'm pretty neutral on B or C. I don't really care and also don't think it
> should even remotely be a concern of ours. Not only do we not have
> testing for it but we don't even have the building blocks in place to
> work towards testing it. VirtualBox is bad and those who use it should
> feel bad.[0]


I think this attitude is detrimental to advancing Fedora's vision [1],
particularly the "widespread" in "free culture is welcoming and
widespread", and I will explain my reasoning below.


> This is probably not a popular opinion and I'm fine with that, but we
> would have to install something that we very publicly speak out
> against in order to test this. I'm not yet ready to throw out Fedora's
> values for the sake of some OS X user's convenience but that's just
> me.
>
> -AdamM
>
> [0] - https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317


This paragraph dismisses a lot of complex realities as "some OS X user's
convenience".

First, I have little control over what my collaborators use, and I have a
hard requirement that I have to be able to work with them. Vagrant and
VirtualBox are the lesser evil I could find that lets my collaborators
quickly build a Fedora staging environment on their computers, and this is
a hard requirement for being able to use Fedora in production. VirtualBox
might be crappy code, so it violates the "First" core value [2], but unlike
the altrenatives, at least it doesn't violate "Freedom".

Second, a user that is interested in Fedora's Vagrant images *wants* to
deploy Fedora somewhere. I wouldn't care about the Vagrant images if I
wouldn't plan to have Fedora in my production system. If I can run Fedora
in Vagrant, using VirtualBox, on an OS X development machine, then I'll end
up deploying it to many VMs or physical boxes, when I ship my software.

For a multitude of non-trivial but boring reasons, I am stuck using OS X on
my dev machine for the near future. I use Fedora 22 in production, however,
meaning that I installed it on ~10 physical / virtual machines, and that
most of my computation happens on a Fedora machine. The Vagrant VirtualBox
image for Fedora 23 is currently broken, and until that gets resolved, I
won't be able to switch my projects to Fedora 23.

I really, really want to use Fedora. However, if it ever gets too painful,
I'll have to switch away. In that case, my collaborators will not be
exposed to Fedora at all anymore, and my computation will be handled by
something else.

Please don't dismiss people like me. I think that network effects will lose
you more users than you think.

    Victor Costan

[1] - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Vision_statement
[2] - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundations
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