I want OO.o support, not Go-OO from Novell - Any statement from Fedora or RedHat?

Marko Vojinovic vvmarko at gmail.com
Thu Nov 4 20:05:16 UTC 2010


On Thursday, November 04, 2010 18:25:52 Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 11/04/2010 10:49 AM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> > Well, in principle no problem exists there, actually. If you want OO in
> > Fedora in the future, feel free to step up and become its maintainer ---
> > package it for Fedora, and put it in the repos. Then the whole Fedora
> > community will have the choice you talk about.
> 
> I was expecting that: the typical elitist cheap-shot aimed at shutting
> up anybody who dares to use Linux without being an uber-geek programmer.

No, it's not aimed to shut you up, sorry if it came across that way. :-)

The reasoning is simple: there are developers/maintainers/packagers who make a 
choice what software is more important to maintain. They decided that LO is 
going to be preferred to OO, and consequently they switched their focus.

As a user, you can either trust their judgment and go along with LO, or oppose 
their judgment if you think you know better. And the latter means, if you 
think you can criticize their choices, you should at least be as competent as 
they are. And that implies maintaining OO to be a no-brainer, right? :-)

However, if you don't have the necessary skills that match those of current 
OO/LO maintainers, how can you question their judgment to switch? Just trust 
that they know better what they are doing, and switch to LO along with 
everyone else. Also, feel free to ask the devs *why* they made the switch, 
they may just be willing to explain and give you arguments that would persuade 
you it's the right thing to do.

What is a cheap-shot is to put your opinion above the devs' opinion, although 
you lack appropriate skills to back it up.

>   You know damned well that less than 5% of Linux users would be capable
> of doing that, so you use the "why don't you maintain it" card to make
> the vast majority of the Linux community feel small.

Umm, no, I didn't want to make anyone feel small, sorry for that too, it 
wasn't my intention. 

But I have repeated a couple of times already (through the years...) that 
there are *two* communities here: the community of 
developers/maintainers/packagers --- in other words people who get to make 
choices, and the community of users, who use the end-product, report bugs, 
help fellow users with advice, promote Fedora, etc., --- and they *do* *not* 
get to make any choices. It's a fair split, those who do the work get to steer 
it further. So if you want to voice your opinion on OO versus LO in Fedora, 
and that opinion is *different* than what the current maintainers think, the 
only way you'll ever get anybody to take you seriously is to be(come) a 
maintainer yourself. Otherwise I don't understand why should anyone listen to 
you over the devs who know all the details and intricacies of OO/LO switch.

My previous e-mail was a "HTH"-type of advice --- you really need to become a 
maintainer of OO if you want have enough credibility to voice your opinion 
(and expect people to listen seriously). And as far as I can tell, who knows, 
maybe you actually *are* among those 5% people who can actually do it. I was 
just trying to point you to the proper course of action.

Now, granted, maybe my post had a bit of irony, but that wasn't pointed 
against you, but just demonstrating the mind-boggling complexity of the task 
of packaging both OO and LO. :-)

Best, :-)
Marko



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