fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 08:17:19PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Acknowledging this: if you want to innovate you have no other option
> than pushing things to the people, and then fix what breaks.

We do not have this luxury. If we "push" something broken to the people, the
people will _completely understandably_ throw up their hands and say "huh,
guess that sucked" and try another distribution. Or stay on their other
distribution -- let Fedora be the playground for developers, and serious
distributions for real users can pick out the parts that worked afterward.

I know we've had plenty of dramatic trolling on this list from people
demanding this or that change from the distribution or else they'll leave
for good. I'm not talking about those noisemakers. I'm talking about _an
actual user base_.

This *is* happening, and we need to tread carefully, because once you loose
respect and reputation, it is very, very hard to get back.

Being innovative is an important part of what Fedora is. But Fedora can't be
*just* Rawhide.

> And I think so far things went really well with systemd, even though
> this discussion might create the impression it didn't.

As long as you stay involved in the discussion, which, again, I appreciate,
we have a chance of things going well. But from the point of view of someone
actively testing systemd, it's looking pretty rocky. You can ignore that if
you want, but *Fedora* can't.




-- 
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional & Research Computing Services
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences