fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)

[Orion Poplawski]

On 08/30/2010 03:11 PM, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
> 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
>

I have to say, while I don't agree with this as a direction, this was one of 
the most thoughtful explanations of the desire for the latest of everything. 
That said, I think developers as more advanced users really need to be able to 
make use of something like rawhide to scratch the itch of working on the 
latest.  The people who I support using Fedora are not primarily developers.

At this point I'm using Fedora for three main reasons - inertia, I use Centos 
and Fedora is very similar, and I very much enjoy being part of a community 
and being able to give back to the community.  Perhaps I can get that 
elsewhere though.

-- 
Orion Poplawski
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