Worthless updates

[William Jon McCann]

Hi Jesse,

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 17:16 +0100, Thomas Janssen wrote:
>> Erm, dont take it personally please, but, have you ever used a
>> different distro? One example is openSUSE (yes, i use it on some boxen
>> here) does exactly that. What's with Debian stable? And i bet even
>> ubuntu is like that.
>
> Neither OpenSUSE nor Ubuntu are as quick to pick up new technologies and
> run with them into a stable release.  Quite often they pick things
> up /after/ Fedora has done a release with them and worked through all
> the hard problems.  They are also slower to release, and don't provide
> nearly as much opportunity to participate in the development of the
> operating system as Fedora does.

Agree with everything else I've seen you say in this thread and in
person on these issues.  But did want to add a note about the above
point...

Actually, I think Ubuntu does a pretty amazing job (all things
considered) with involving their community in the development of their
OS.  This is actually sort of strange since they don't really do as
much development in general.  Whether they can sustain this as they
move away from upstreams remains to be seen.  But, I think one reason
for that success is they seem to support and encourage use of the
development stream (which would be our Rawhide).  Whereas, we actively
discourage it - in words and deeds.  This kinda sucks because one of
our greatest assets is our relationship to and leadership upstream.  I
think, ideally, there should be no better OS for upstream open source
work than Fedora.  Unfortunately, this is not the case today.  Some
will say that developmental progress is synonymous with brokenness.
On the contrary, progress is only possible when the development
platform is available and ready for work.

Remember that packaging and releasing is not development - it is an
end state of a stream of development.  There is a separation in time
between the two.  When we talk about Fedora facilitating development
it should be clear that even Rawhide updates must be stable enough to
bootstap up to work on the bits that will become a future Rawhide -
and only after construction, validation, and distribution occur.

I am optimistic that discussions such as this one will lead us in the
right direction.  Keep up the good work Jesse (et al).

>> So where is that unique role? Except you mean the exact 6 month
>> release cycle. But who cares about that.
>>
>
> See above.

I think we fill a number of unique roles.  Many of them are related to
being trusted to either lead or choose the best available direction
through the nearly infinite possibilities available from the open
source ecosystem.  Or in the words of Charles Eames: "It's an ability
to select among the unlimited possibilities and return considerable
richness to the world."

One question is whether we will also be the ones to deliver it.  I hope so.

Jon