fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)

[Kevin Kofler]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> 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.

So what? Isn't that part of what Fedora is about? There must be SOMEBODY 
taking the risks or things will never move. One of the main goals of Fedora 
is to be that somebody, even if it means other distros which parasite our 
stabilization efforts will be able to provide a more reliable user 
experience in some cases (but at the cost of shipping old software which is 
often missing features the users need or having issues already resolved in 
the latest upstream code, because those distributions, by relying on fast-
moving distros such as Fedora to test the stuff, have to wait for us to test 
them out for them first). And to be blunt, why do you think Red Hat has 
started and keeps funding Fedora? Is it not because it is a "playground for 
developers" from which RHEL "can pick out the parts that worked afterward"?

Of course there's a limit to what we can do while keeping our distribution 
usable and desirable for people. But we have to take risks, or we will not 
be able to ship the latest and greatest features our users choose us for! 
And the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem would not work without distributions 
taking those risks.

At the end, I think things always played out well, even Fedora 9 turned out 
not to be the major disaster people were calling it out to be (and KDE 4, 
starting at 4.0.3 and gradually upgraded to improved versions up to 4.2.4 in 
updates, was not the only risky major change in it! There was also Upstart 
(which for some reason didn't cause as much scandal as systemd now is, maybe 
because all its improvements over SysVInit weren't actually used), a new 
GCC, a new X.Org X11 drawing complaints from proprietary driver users etc.).

        Kevin Kofler