fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)

[Thomas Janssen]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 9:36 PM, Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:
> "Thomas Janssen" <thomasj at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>What previous niche?
>
> We had a distro that was pretty general purpose, worked for servers and desktops and even laptops. We had a predictable schedule.
> We had new technology thanks to rawhide. We had timely bugfixes that didn't sacrifice stability,
> as in things didn't change out from under you on a stable release. We had an ecosystem of third parties
> that would build up stacks of newer things should a user be adventurous.  We had a fresh release quite
>  often that could be relied upon for at least a year. We had a culture of not just throwing crap over the wall at our users, which included ourselves. We had accountability when things did go awry and a honest
>  effort to disrupt the users of our stable releases as little as possible. We also we're a very free distro avoiding nonfree stuff, and we worked well with
>  upstreams.  We we're easy to configure, easy to update, easy to install whether a single system or 400 systems in a lab. We we're easy to administrate in the same scenarios.
>
> This was fairly unique and what drew a lot of people to the project.

I'm not sure i would call that a niche, but it sounds very good. Count me in.

>>> It's getting to
>>> the point where me, as a long time Fedora developer and sometimes
>>> leader, is not enjoying using Fedora any more.  Every update run can
>>> break things, and often does.
>>
>>Why not give QA the time to settle and find out how the new things work out?
>
> Because the likes of Kevin throw fits whenever we try to insert any QA time or seem to try and improve the quality of our updates in any way other than "throw more of them at people."

Hm, ignore Kevin or the likes here. The new Bodhi and proventesters
are a good step in the right direction. As proventester and
24/7-updates-testing enabled guy, i can say, it starts to work. Thanks
to everybody involved.

>>> Every update takes for ever because there
>>> are so many updates.  Too many to review each one and see what it does,
>>> and how to maybe test it and provide feedback.  Updates runs just get
>>> pushed off longer and longer so that I have a block of time to A) apply
>>> the damn things, and B) spend a few hours recovering from any sort of
>>> fallout in my workflow.
>>
>>What DE is in use on your box?
>
> I use Gnome with some KDE apps.

The Gnome Desktop should be safe (not a Gnome user so i can only guess
here, sorry) and the KDE Desktop gets more and more "stable". Means
the *big* UI changes are over. Small improvements will most likely
always happen, together with bugfixes, as that's the KDE philosophy.
People like me likes that, but i can understand the others who don't
want even small changes.

I personally would like to see a F n-1 that gets just the badly needed
bugfixes (security and crash). But have the latest release get mixed
updates, bugfixes and smaller UI improvements. That way, the ones with
slow i-net or just don't want to see much updates could be happy with
n-1. And all the others as well with the latest release.

Rawhide and personal repos, would still fulfil the role for people
living on the real bleeding side of the edge and for hot-new-stuff to
develop in.

-- 
Best regards
Thomas