WTF? Inaccessible bug reports?

[Christopher Brown]

Hello Olivier!

On 20/11/2007, Olivier Galibert <galibert at pobox.com> wrote:
> [Sent it personally instead of to the list by mistake]

See, people make mistakes!

> On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 06:06:54PM +0100, Lubomir Kundrak wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 2007-11-20 at 15:51 +0100, Olivier Galibert wrote:
> > > On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 08:26:47AM -0600, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > > > Perhaps you should calm down a bit.  Flying off the handle before
> > > > asking if the bug permissions can be changed or an explanation is
> > > > provided is probably not going to be very productive.
> > >
> > > Well, sorry.  Fedora becomes worse for my use with each release I try,
> > > and I'm starting to get really annoyed at that, because it used to be
> > > so much better.
> >
> > May I ask what's "your use"?
>
> My use is a team in a lab with 100-200 machines, about 30 of them
> physically on people's desktops, about 80 in two oscar clusters.  Some
> of the people could do system administration, some couldn't, most
> don't want to anyway.

I don't blame them with this kind of attitude hanging around.

> Since I ended up as sysadmin-by-default, I need a distribution which I
> can install and update with a minimum amount of fussing, and where the
> installation has pretty much everything the users are going to need.

Dude, you're using Fedora? Seriously, I love it but I wouldn't deploy
it large scale. Thats what RHEL or CentOS is for.

> At fedora core 3 times, things were reasonably nice.  You could do an
> everything install, test it for a while to see what was missing and/or
> broken, put the packages and the additionally needed ones in a local
> network repository and go.  And you would be ok for two years.

See above.

> At fedora core 5 times, Everything was lost.  Thankfully it is still
> in kickstart, but it makes the initial testing phase more annoying.
> Way more problematic is the support time which went down to one year.

See above.

> At fedora 7 time, Core was mostly lost.  There is still the list of
> package on the DVD as a guideline though, but there isn't a separate
> updates directory you can easily merge in anymore.  To the point that
> I didn't find the time to do the new installation before 8 was out.

See above.

> Now we're at 8 and I want to try to move to it, but static ip support
> is fucked, and the list of packages on the DVD doesn't even have tcsh,
> which 50% of the people here use.  Installing from the DVD by checking
> all 3 options at the top level doesn't even give you make or gcc,
> which is kind of annoying when the reason for installing interactively
> in the first place is to have everything needed to hack on anaconda to
> fix the static ip issue.  An yum install '*' conflicts all the way due
> to the multilib crap.

You are insance if you think a "yum install *" will work. Section 8.
Certifiable. As for tcsh that is what kickstart is for as well as make
and gcc.

> And that's before anybody has even started to *use* the distribution.
>
> Fedora makes me think of E.R., at times.  In the first seasons the
> show was about the hospital, and found its public.  Then they seem to
> have decided try to extend its viewership by adding a lot on
> interpersonal relationships to the point of forgetting the hospital
> part.  The old public left, not having what they wanted anymore, and
> the potential new one stayed with Gray's Anatomy, which does
> relationships much better.  And the viewership is crashing down.

And you're the patient with hypochondria.

> Fedora was originally nice for people coming from an Unix background,
> where 50% of the windows on the screen are xterms.  It seems to have
> collectively decided that it should instead cater to the Windows kind
> of people, to the detriment of the Unix ones.  A default installation
> does not have a compiler.  Everything looking slightly technical is
> hidden as much as possible.  Easily understandable and editable text
> configuration files are routinely replaced by an obfuscated xml-based
> registry[1] with automatically generated GUIs from hell[2].  Basic
> things like static ips and routes are considered legacy and their
> support totally untested and/or considered unimportant.  And
> significantly every comparison is done with Ubuntu, the epitome of the
> windowsian-come-here distributions, and never with Debian or Gentoo.
>
> Keep cranking up the pain, guys, and fedora will definitively makes
> its place in the "master of none" category.

Keep on bitching and being rude on devel and I'll use my coffee break
to write these helpful replies.

> It's kinda sad that people who do such a good job upstream end up
> building such a crappier-over-time distribution from it.

Gee thanks, I'm searching for things you've done to help but am scratching.


> [1] gconf I'm looking at you

and I bet its _scared_...

> [2] The only thing worse than a GUI designed by a computer scientist
>     is a GUI automatically generated from a format description.

Fair enough. Scrap those silly GUI's and lets start again. But no
pesky computer scientists this time!

Cheers
Chris

-- 
http://www.chruz.com