FedoraOS Server Platform ( FOSSP )

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 11/16/2013 02:24 PM, Simo Sorce wrote:
> On Sat, 2013-11-16 at 13:23 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
>
>> As I see it they would handle the core ( think comps minimal here ) not
>> base since base is something that cannot be shared.
> I wonder how many people share this idea, so far it seem to me you are
> the only one that thinks we are forking the distribution in 2/3
> independent projects.
>
> To be perfectly clear I did not sign up to fork the distribution, and it
> is not my understanding of what the 3 products are.

To be perfectly clear I do not care what you signed up for and I myself 
signup for a very much different reason then you did and in a such a 
diverse community I assume all of us did since Fedora means different 
thing to different people which is one of the reason why labelling it 
has failed all those years and why it will fail again with these WG's 
where Fedora has been split into "3 product".

For over half a decade I've been part of the QA community were alot of 
the processes that exist and are in use today because of me ( with the 
exception of triagers and proven testers where I told people at that 
time those processes would fail and guess what they did and my failure 
was thinking I could improve reporting through better documentation with 
my how to debug process ) on top of that been the feature owner and 
migratory of the largest controversial change, the migration to a new 
init systemd which I'm still doing with the knowledge I have to redo all 
the units again to bring them up to speed.

I've gotten some of Lennart's "fan mail" ending up in my inbox due that 
work so I know exactly how much people dislike changes/disruption.

Being an ambassador I know how much regular end user hate their desktop 
disruptions.

I've gone over up to 500 components migrating services/daemons their 
packaging script, their startup and now looking at cron jobs and when 
doing so I go through all their bugs to see if someone has filed or 
migrated initscript so I see a lot about maintainers and maintainership 
about the packages they own, majority of which are "poorly" maintained 
even orphaned or with incomplete features even after they have been 
flagged 100% complete.

I would be amazed during my entire time here with the project if there 
is not a shit that I have not encountered or discovered and quite 
frankly I'm amazed sometimes we can release et all.

This entire effort I see as an opportunity to change that from the 
ground up and I'm willing to do that work single handedly if I have to 
because it bugs me and bugs me alot how things that should not be broken 
are broken ( after all I'm only used to deal with packages in the 
hundred+ range ) and that's a work that I will be doing anyway despite 
how this entire WG ends up to be.

Now the only way I see to achieve that ( because of what I have seen and 
what needs to be done to fix it will break stuff for people ) without 
disrupting existing workflow for our user base is as you put it "fork 
the distribution"  which to me is just moving package a --> cleaning it 
up putting it into FedoraOS.

Ones that process is over and that the entire WG effort not been proven 
as failure then we can drop old "Fedora" and rename FedoraOS as Fedora 
for all I care.

>> Community driven distribution cannot promise stability of any sort.
> Sorry but this is simply untrue, Debian has a recurring release that is
> stable and relatively well maintained.

Really how familiar are you with Debian inner workings and which 
components are being well maintained and which not?

>> The only thing they can promise is best effort.
> And that is fine, nobody is asking for miracles.

Well maintainers have shown concern that WG's are signing them up for 
something that they neither cant nor wont deliver and RH has responded 
in a board ticket I filed a while back that it wont support LTS release.

I'm pretty sure you dont know that the Thunderbirds maintainer pushed 
update to F18 knowingly that broke it's integration with Gnome's 
notification scheme so I dont share the same faith that you do in our 
maintainers and since the maintainership of components is heavily depend 
on the individual(s) behind it , where some do really good job of it, 
others to pretty ok job of it and some poor job of it and some none et 
all it and knowing that as well as maintainers concerns, keeping the 
server roles in separated repo makes the most sense since it gives them 
the ability and *freedom* ( within reasonable boundaries ) to maintain 
what they think is to the best to heir ability and us in QA to somewhat 
test their component in the process.

Honestly I dont know why certain people insist that having 
FOS/FOSSP/FOSSR each on a multiple different release cycle wont work.

I'm pretty sure we can apply something that was in use as early as in 
the days of Aristotle is in use today and provides us with the math to 
calculate ahead of time the outcome for each release cycle to be able to 
organize us and each team ( marketing,releng,qa etc. ) accordingly but 
maybe I'm missing something...

>>>> Quite frankly looking at our whole ecosystem what we need is a generation
>>>> change to flush out that outdated way's of thinking perhaps that's what's is
>>>> slowly making us irrelevant and obsolete.
>>> The trouble is that flushing out that outdated ways of thinking
>>> automatically implies flushing out all the working software with no
>>> replacement but well-intentioned ideas.
>> How do you come to that conclusion?
>> ( I'm talking about those making decisions in Fedora lacking fresh
>> mindset/ideas and perspective  )
> Because experience tells us, we've seen already a few generations of
> young revolutionaries, and yes sometimes they do achieve something
> great, but those are the exceptions, the vast majority of people that
> decided to 'start from scratch' ends up badly.
> So we may look conservative to you, that is fine by me.

Being conservative is one thing and that's fine + I'm not suggesting we 
are "starting from scratch" entirely.

>> Keeping these two things separated ( Fedora vs FedoraOS ) we wont be
>> throwing out anything. We simply will be choosing existing bits cleaning
>> them up, intergrade them better with one another ( if applicable ) and
>> place them in FedoraOS
> I wonder if you have a blind spot or are intentionally ignoring the
> magnitude of work because you give it for granted.

Really quite the opposite I would say I'm actually few of the 
individuals that exactly knows how much pile of shit we have to cleanup 
in the distribution and the work that is required do so and I'm not 
expecting us being able to deliver anything usable in the hands of our 
end users until first time late next year.

>   We can achieve some
> success only through the collaboration of a *large* group of people,

True enough but are you sure that large group of people are behind the 
WG effort et all?

>   if
> every subgroup decides to redo all the work, we go nowhere, because the
> packaging work, the testing etc.. is the *hard* part done in the
> distribution. And you are in essence proposing we start from scratch,

Not entirely no but I'm well aware since I'm more anal about this stuff 
then most people about the amount of work required to do things properly.

JBG