/usrmove?

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Genes MailLists <lists at sapience.com> wrote:
> On 02/10/2012 07:07 AM, Josh Boyer wrote:
>
>> That is the definition of a product.  Fedora has never been a product.
>> Fedora is a community driven distribution and as such has no central
>> or overriding authority to tell people that volunteer their time to go do
>> some specific thing they don't feel like doing.
>
>  True - however many of us look to fedora as the future RHEL as well.

RHEL is a product.  Fedora may be the base of that but it's a bit naive to
think that it's taken directly and just shoved out the door.  There is ample
time to actually productize, stablize, and align RHEL.

(Also, RHEL ships a substantially smaller package set than Fedora.)

>> At best, FESCo can tell people no.  However, they'd have to know
>> about something bad before it happened, and there are far too many
>> packages to monitor in that fashion under today's setup.
>>
>> josh
>
>  As a lowly user, there is the impression that creating a sense of
> urgency late in the cycle and being loud and pushy are good ways to get
> features in.
>
>  Sadly, none of those adjectives imply good design or well written
> software - only claims to same, oftentimes the truth is less so.
>
>  While I do believe many of the features (as discussed here) have a lot
> of merit, the way they are arriving in fedora (esp the last year or so)
> is very disappointing.
>
>  What can be done?
>
>  (i) May I suggest new features require a review and comment period
> with Fesco having the final say.
>

They already do.  The pages are written, reviewed by the Feature wrangler,
and are available for anyone to read and comment on.  FESCo approves them,
taking comments into account.

>  Features that are 'core' - should require substantial review and
> broader community engagement before being accepted.

That's already the intention.  The process could perhaps use some work.  I hear
there are people looking into that.

>  (ii) Limit major features to 1 per release is also crucial - if that
> slows dev down too much, then switch to rolling release where testing
> only allows major  feature at a time until that one is solid and moved
> to production. Only then allow the next major feature into testing.

Switching to a rolling release seems both drastic and orthogonal to the problem
of wide-spread features.

>   I have watched with some dismay and sadness what is happening to
> fedora. It can be great again ... however it needs work.

Honestly, I wonder if people are focusing on and remembering only the
development periods of releases as of late.  Reading back through the lists
during the F16 timeframe, one would have thought it was an utterly broken
release that worked for noone and broke thousands of machines.  Yet the final
release, IMHO, seems great.  I've really had no issues on any of the 4 machines
running F16 (including the f16 ppc64 secondary arch release).

Maybe if you're staring at the meat grinder all day the last thing you want to
do is go home and eat sausage, but I do think it's important to judge a release
on it's GA quality.  Immediately discounting it during the Alpha and Beta
phases is both premature and non-productive.

josh