fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)

[Jon Masters]

On Thu, 2010-08-26 at 19:51 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > My hunch is that a couple thousand a week are probably due to cable
> > modems or laptops moving to addresses we simply haven't seen before.
> > That's about how many new IPs appear for Fedora 7 or Rawhide each
> > week.  But there's just no way to tell cause other than hunches.  The
> > folks who hang out in IRC #fedora as well as users@ list susbscribers
> > can confirm people show up pretty frequently with newly-installed EOL
> > Fedora.
> 
> We probably need to attack this trend more aggressively, like putting 
> expiration dates into the installer after which it'll just refuse to 
> install, stuffing fedora-release-n+1 into the Fedora n updates repository at 
> Fedora n's EOL date etc.

Ah yes, attack the symptom and not the disease. Yay. Let me let you in
on a secret. Most people (and by which I mean, those not on this list)
generally don't like re-installing or upgrading their computer every 6
months. People install older releases because it's what they have (in
which case, there's a valid reason to push for the latest) BUT also
because they don't want to be using an extension of rawhide. They want
to wait a little time for things to settle down, for there to be fewer
updates to waste their time on, etc. It's the rate of churn, lack of
durability in the length of the cycle, etc. that are the problems.

But sure, we can blame the users, and scratch our heads when the figures
indicate what might be happening, why people are jumping ship, etc. and
not have a user survey to tell us what the users want (a fantastic
idea). These would all help maintain the status quo just fine.

Jon.