long term support release

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Sat, 2008-01-26 at 22:29 -0300, Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 12:12 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > > Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> 
> > > >>                                      If the latter effort fails,
> > > >> you've still got a solid, working version.
> 
> > > > If you want "solid, working", why are you messing around with
> > > > "bleeding-edge apps"?!
> 
> > > Why are people writing 'bleeding-edge' apps if there is no reason to use 
> > > them?
> 
> > I guess no reasonable _user_ wants 'bleeding-edge'.
> 
> I consider myself "reasonable"... but sure, the evaluation comes from
> awfully close ;-)
I guess your objective is "development of the distro" itself. 

My objective is application development, the distro itself is secondary
and is a vehicle.

> > As a developer, it's not a major problem for _me_ having to cope with a
> > couple of issues here and there, but how do you expect "Aunt Tillie" to
> > cope with them? 
> 
> Perhaps Fedora isn't for her then.
We are back to the point of questioning Fedora's target audience. As it
currently seem to me the target audience is "RH distro developers".

> > Also, with F8 I have been confronted with so many tiny issues, which all
> > together render productive use of Fedora close to impossible and have
> > caused me to have doubts on the project's sanity.
> 
> Have you reported them?
Many of those I could identify the cause of, many have been reported by
others before, many have not yet been reported, ... many are not
reportable.

> [BTW, most of the F8 timeline I was running rawhide, and I was reasonably
>  productive al throughout, except for some short glitches. So I don't buy
>  your "close to impossible to use".]
Just to mention a few:

- The yum on F8's DVD is broken. It produces incorrect results.
- The DVD's packaging only contains a subset of packages. It doesn't
allow upgrading from  FC7+updates at all.
- F7 updates had a couple of nasty packaging bugs (e.g. avahi), which
cause the F8 upgrade process to break.


Another issue: the kernel.
For me, Fedora 8 doesn't boot without carefully handcrafted boot
parameters on 3 out of 4 machines. Aunt Tillie would never have been
able to fix them.

> > Interestingly, it's not the "community-maintained packages" some seem to
> > preferr to accuse to be of low quality, which are causing the trouble,
> > it's the sum of issues with the "standard/default packages" which are
> > piling up.
> 
> Stands to reason, the "standard/default packages" are the foundation of the
> system.
Yes, while this is true, consider "other packages" are equally important
to an individual's installation.

This is likely the cause the majority of community maintainers to be
tending to apply different strategies on bug fixing: They often use
their packages themselves, therefore they fix bugs inside of their
packages themselves for all Fedoras.

@RH maintained "standard/default packages" on the other hand often
appear to be maintained by people who "have been ordered to take an
unloved job/duty".

> > >   A desktop app that crashes once in a while is not a huge problem 
> > > - and wouldn't be a problem at all if there were an option to drop back 
> > > to a more stable version.
> > >   A machine that won't boot or a device driver 
> > > that no longer talks to my hardware is.
> > Yep, that's one subset amongst several sets of issues I am facing ;)
> 
> > Fortunately, these happen to be the easy cases. The really nagging ones
> > are those, one can't identify the cause of.
> 
> And those get magically fixed by extending the life of a random version
> with an understaffed crew doing on-and-off bug fixing and 
> backporting? 

In not too rare cases, yes, because backporting closes "one case" from
the "pile of bugs". It could be the bug which has caused the damage in
an individual's situation. It is the place where the "magic" happens
which causes "magic bug fixes" to happen.

> In my experience, they end getting fixed by moving forward.
A bug is only fixed if it takes place in the current release. Fixing
bugs by moving forward on "rawhide", "upstream", or "sitting bugs out"
doesn't fix anything for the current release and doesn't help users of
the current release.

Ralf