Heads-up: brand new RPM version about to hit rawhide

[Doug Ledford]

On Sun, 2008-07-13 at 23:37 -0400, James Antill wrote: 
> On Sat, 2008-07-12 at 20:20 -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:
> 
> > It's not head in the sand Jesse.  It's that following the daytime soap
> > opera that is rpm4 vs rpm5 vs jbj vs everyone else isn't the least bit
> > worth my time.
> 
>  Doug, if I did some patches for the Linux kernel and acted as you have
> the last couple of days I'd be ignored or flamed to a crisp ...

Depends on whether or not your patches were correct and solved a
problem.  The linux kernel community has both forgiven and harbored some
really atrocious behavior in the past if the person's code was good.

> likely
> to never have my patches looked at.
>  If you'd spoken to anyone involved with rpm,

Well, until Panu's announcement, I didn't know he was working on rpm.

> yum 

Really?  Probably 99% of the changes I'm talking about don't involve
yum, so that would seem an odd place to go...

> or Fedora rel-eng 

I did talk to Jesse about it in the past, but just like every single
other time I've talked to either Fedora or Red Hat rel-eng about this
sort of thing, no one has the incentive to make it work.  And really,
this is no surprise...this change won't markedly improve rel-eng's
lives, it will make them slightly more complex.  It's the developers
that benefit from this.  So I had just resigned myself to the idea that
rel-eng isn't ever going to make this happen for the developers, someone
would just have to do it themselves.

Anyway, I'll repeat what I said to Jesse when he said I was burying my
head in the sand.  You will never make me feel guilty for not being
intimately familiar with the political and personnel makeup of an area
of coding that is so far outside of my own area of normal work.  You can
try to all you want, but since I don't blame and/or chastise people for
not being intimately familiar with what kernel leuitenant to send which
type of patch to when they aren't kernel hackers themselves, I refuse to
accept blame from other people when I'm in a similar situation.

> at
> any point you'd have been told what was happening and how you should go
> about getting what you want. Pretending there was or is any kind of
> confusion about rpm's future is like someone pretending they thought
> Linux might merge with OpenSolaris.

Last I knew, rpm5 isn't dead, so you could of fooled me.  Are you saying
that even if the people still working on rpm5 put out a new version
that's so totally kick ass that it makes our incremental changes to rpm4
look like something cooked up in a child's Easy Bake Oven then we would
still stick with rpm4?

The fact of the matter is that there exists a split in the rpm
development process with two parties going two different ways, and if
you claim to know which path you will follow before those paths have
actually played out far enough to know which path is the best path, then
your politics are overriding your judgment of the technical merits and
that would be counter to Fedora's goal of being the *BEST* all free open
source software distribution.  I seriously hope that this isn't the
case.

> The fact that you are still trying to blame everyone else for your own
> mistakes

Really?  Did I actually throw blame at someone, or accuse them of
something?  I did say that Panu said that the headers would be a piece
of cake, but also said they are F11 material.  That's been the only
thing I've complained about/accused anyone of to date.  That's mainly
because I wanted the headers in place so I could start playing with the
scripts and stuff I was going to place around those headers to make
things work.  If you recall from my email asking for those headers, I
made it clear that I *thought* adding them was a bigger deal than it was
and that if there was already going to be an rpm flag day to do the
other upgrades to rpm, that I wanted the headers to go in to avoid a
double flag day.  Panu corrected me on that issue.

However, his correction also pointed out just how simple and no-brainer
it would be to add the headers so we could play with things, so it was
sort of a double edged sword in terms of whether or not it supported my
side of the argument or his.  In any case, the only accusation/blame I
*ever* made in this thread was that Panu's decision was blocking me up.
And I stand by that.  However, since his clarification also made it
clear that the headers aren't an rpm flag day event, I can go off and
modify my rpm separately and work without those changes in the official
rpm somewhat easier, which is why in a later email I said I had just
about beat this thread to death and I was going off to code.

Actually James, I think I've behaved rather well...for a kernel engineer
that can both take and dish out the stuff that gets thrown around in the
kernel community.  Could you imagine if Al Viro were writing this
instead of me?

> and trying to tell them what they should be doing for _you_ and
> how/when they should be doing it.

I asked for *one* thing, a simple thing, and said I would do the rest
myself.  And I've also said I would just go off and do it.  So where
exactly are you pulling the justification for this statement from?

> While they are still trying to
> patiently help you,

You know, I just don't see this thread the way you do James.  There has
been *some* amount of patiently helping me, a far larger amount of
constructive back and forth in the form of "you would need to make sure
you handled this, and took care of that" (maybe you consider the
constructive back and forth to be patiently helping, but seeing as it's
back and forth with me producing as many valid arguments as anyone else,
I see that as back and forth...you have to be educating me for it to be
patiently helping).  There's also been more than I would care to see of
"I don't think this is a good idea", "It can't be done, we *must* have
tarballs", "The world would come to an end if we did as you suggest"
type negativity.  I don't mind negativity based in fact, but some of it
has been based in dogma, and that I could care less to hear.

> speaks volumes.

The letter you have written is both inaccurate and unjustified, which in
my opinion "speaks volumes" far more than anything I've written.  While
I've attempted to set some facts straight, I have also attempted to
refrain from the petty and vindictive retaliations this unconstructive
email most certainly deserved.  You're welcome.

-- 
Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>
              GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
              http://people.redhat.com/dledford

Infiniband specific RPMs available at
              http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20080714/011d8418/attachment.bin