fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)

[Miloslav Trmač]

Jon Masters píše v Po 30. 08. 2010 v 16:13 -0400: 
> On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 12:36 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> 
> > We had a distro that was pretty general purpose, worked for servers
> > and desktops and even laptops. We had a predictable schedule.
> 
> It's called Laissez-faire meets reality. Right now we have a lot of
> "free market" philosophy in Fedora that basically says if everything is
> left alone then good things will magically happen, sum is greater than
> the parts, yada yada yada.
Too many labels, too little predictive value...

Let's talk specifically about incentives instead.  If interested Linux
developers meet to create a distribution because they want to, you'll
inevitably get an updates firehose:


A typical developer wants the dependencies of the software they are
working on to be _very_ up to date - probably not the upstream
development version, but the upstream maintenance version with _all_
current bug fixes.  Waiting 6 months for a bug fix does not make sense -
at that point the developer would be tempted to build the new version
locally.

So, web developers want latest httpd/PHP/Rails/MySQL; GNOME developers
want latest gtk/libgnome*; and so on.

Similarly, everyone who cares about the tools they use daily (which
developers tend to), wants the best versions of these tools, as soon as
it is practical.  So, newest version of emacs/vim/kdevelop/...

[Some people develop low-level software against glibc, and haven't
changed their development environment for years; for them the flow of
updates really is not that interesting, and it seems superfluous.]

Saying "use rawhide" is not helpful, because rawhide is very often
broken.  A "stable" release that breaks a specific component for a few
days is acceptable - if this is not a component one uses for
development, it doesn't matter; if this is such a component, one knows
about it well enough to be able to revert an update or to contribute a
fix.


When a large number of Fedora contributions are not paid to do so, they
naturally write a distribution _for themselves_.  Why would they not?

That means that updates will be frequent; few maintainers would push
updates they consider too risky, but some risk is acceptable.  The
"updates firehose" for components one does not much care about is a
minor risk, compared to the "commit firehose" for a mid-size program on
which one collaborates with two or more other people.

The result is a distribution on which it is reasonably easy to develop
current software, and a distribution on which one might not update
critical system updates on the night before giving a presentation on a
conference (FWIW, I can't recall a really bad updates experience).  That
doesn't seem to be a bad tradeoff - for a developer.


Now, if we Fedora should be a distribution that developers enjoy using,
there will be an updates firehose - and most developers won't mind too
much.  If Fedora should be a distribution that developers can install on
their grandparents' computers, developers won't enjoy working on the
distribution so much - both because this requires bureaucracy, and
because the result is not as interesting a distribution - and either the
quality and size of the distribution will suffer, or there will have to
be another motivation for many people to participate.

So, does Fedora want to be a place where interested Linux developers
meet to create a distribution they enjoy, or a project where people who
are for some reason compelled to create a distribution for others
collaborate on it?

What Fedora advertised is "..., Features, First" - that's a developer's 
distro; Fedora was never "M million happy users, growing X% annually".
Mirek