Anaconda is totally trashing the F18 schedule (was Re: f18: how to install into a LVM partitions (or RAID))

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 07:17:30PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-11-01 at 03:09 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > I'd recommend asking dcantrell, as he has some good points on this
> > > topic. I broadly agree with him that it might well be more or less
> > > impossible to smoothly handle a major rewrite of anaconda in our current
> > > development process. CCing to make sure he sees this.
> > 
> > There's only one sane conclusion to draw from that: There MUST NOT be a 
> > major rewrite of Anaconda, EVER. That it was allowed to happen for F18 was a 
> > major mistake.
> > 
> > Anaconda is the least tested component in Fedora (most people test it at 
> > most once every 6 months) 
> 
> Offsetting this is the fact that the QA team tests it massively,
> massively more than we test any other component.
> 
> anaconda is certainly far more heavily tested than any niche package in
> the distro - the scientific tools, obscure desktops, apps not many
> people use etc. It's clearly absurd to say it's the least tested
> component.
> 
> > and arguably the most critical (because it is 
> > required to get Fedora up and running at all). The less it changes, the 
> > better!
> 
> This is the path to stagnation: it's old code, but we're too scared to
> change it. The older it gets, the more scared we get. And then you wake
> up and it's 2012 and your business still runs on a System/38 mainframe.
> That's not what Fedora is supposed to be about.

Just so we're all on the same page, the System/38 was not a mainframe in the
sense that the s390 and s390x architectures are mainframes.  It was a
descendant of the System/360 and the ancestor to the AS/400.

And if your business *is* running on an s390x mainframe in 2012 and you
haven't tried Fedora on it, check out the secondary arch project:

    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/s390x

-- 
David Cantrell <dcantrell at redhat.com>
Manager, Installer Engineering Team
Red Hat, Inc. | Westford, MA | EST5EDT