Reasons for hall monitoring

[Stephen John Smoogen]

2010/5/8 Matěj Cepl <mcepl at redhat.com>:
> Dne 8.5.2010 03:39, Stephen John Smoogen napsal(a):
>> It is a blessing and it is a curse. Why do more developers show up at
>> conferences these days running Ubuntu or Debian systems.. many who
>> used to run Fedora or RHL? My very non-scientific survey has been that
>> it isn't that Ubuntu is cooler, etc.. but it is just much more stable.
>
> a) there is a reason, why I have mentioned that bigger doesn't have to
> be better ... it is quite obvious to me that user-oriented distro would
> be more popular than developer-oriented one.

I think many of us in this thread are in agreement on this issue. We
just word it differently enough that we don't realize it ;).

> b) do you have real testimonies of scores of developers Fedora
> *switching to* Ubuntu? I would love to hear them. I don't care that much
> about people using Ubuntu, because they always used Ubuntu (or Debian),
> but people who actually switched from Fedora (perhaps even RHEL, but
> that's slightly different ... default selection of packages is quite
> limited in RHEL, so I can imagine that somebody who doesn't like to have
> three or four repositories switched on, may be lured by the endless
> package offering in Debian world).

No my selection was pretty limited to 4 or 5 people I noticed at a
talk who I was pretty sure had had Fedora desktops a couple of years
ago. Very unscientific... but I would not get testimonials from
because they are even worse in their persuasive power over people. I
believe it is something we need to study.

>> but on the other hand they don't have to
>> worry that the 3 KDE apps they use didn't completely change over a
>> weekend (or vice versa the 2 gnome apps they depend on for something
>> didn't break because ibus got added as a dependency and didn't work
>> for some reason.)

Ugh I needed to reword that sentence it makes no sense.  I meant to say

The various gnome apps that break because some dependency added ibus
and it didn't work for some reason. The way I worded could be viewed
as derogatory to KDE when I was trying to find examples where both
groups have had issues.


>> The vision works as long as the set of packages and packagers is
>> small. It is very much the "Tragedy of the Commons" where at a certain
>> point I don't have a strong enough social link to think or worry about
>> what effect my package might have on something 30 packages away from
>> me. The fact that its broken and 4 users left doesn't really affect me
>> unless it turns out that it is Linus and he says something like "Sorry
>> about missing 2.6.36-rc1.. but for some reason Xmonkey. started
>> writing 0's to all my files last night and my backups too... Didn't
>> know I even had it installed.." Sure it got pulled in because it gives
>> libslapmonkey and now vim pulls it in so you can have an animated
>> monkey if you type :monkeybrainz [or some such thing.] But in cases
>> where it isn't Linus people just don't know.
>
> You may be right, I don't have good arguments here, but I would just
> point out that your example is about kernel ... which quite certainly
> should be on the critical path. How many such disasters could be caused

Actually my example was supposed to be about vim or whatever causes
Linus pain.  The reason people take notice of the problem was because
it affected someone in a way that gets LWN notice. It was also
supposed to be about how a maintainer may not know how his package is
affecting people because its included in something that it wasn't
before.

Ugh I write horribly on a Friday it would seem.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.""
-- Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines