Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, “Why?”)

[lee]

Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> writes:

> Because it grew rather long, I think it works best as a web article, which
> you can find on Fedora Magazine at <http://fedoramagazine.org/?p=1236>.


> Because really, even though many people think the base OS is now
> boring, it’s far from done, and there is a lot of innovation going on
> at that level as well.

What do you consider as "base OS"?

And I don`t think it`s boring.  I think it`s bad that

+ you find more and more stuff running

+ that it`s difficult to find out what this or that process does which
  wasn`t there before the last update/upgrade

+ that a lot of what is running is something you never need and

+ that it is usually difficult to impossible to get rid of stuff you
  don`t need.


And on top of that, what is the Fedora-way of replacing gnome --- which
I find totally useless --- with fvwm, which perfectly does what I want?
It`s only one example, and you can figure out how to do it.  But the
point with this is that Fedora lacks flexibility.  You get what you get
and then have to go through a lengthy process of getting rid of stuff
and of somehow getting to work what you need, like fvwm.

On a side note: The installer sucks, just try to do one of the most
basic and important things with it: Partitioning.  And when you managed
that, you can`t start with a minimal install and install just what you
need.

> I was at a large cloud conference a while ago, and almost nobody was
> using Fedora, and so I asked people why they chose the distribution
> they are building their stuff on, and why they didn’t choose
> Fedora. Almost universally, the response wasn’t “What I am using is
> great!” — it was “Oh, I don’t care. I just picked this, and that’s
> what I’m using and it’s fine.”

I`m not one of these people.  Thinking like that, they don`t need a
Linux distribution; they can as well use Windoze or Macos.

> Even if there really are a lot of interesting things going on, people
> who are trying to actually do things with the distribution don’t
> attach much importance to them.

Not paying attention to the soft- and hardware that is the basis of what
you`re actually doing is a recipe for failure, and for making things
difficult on yourself.

One thing Fedora shines with (so far) is reliability, and reliability is
one of the requirements I have.  I have been using Debian for almost
twenty years until they messed up badly with their brokenarch.  Doing
that put Debian out of the question once and for all because they failed
that requirement miserably beyond believe.

Please do not make the same mistake with Fedora.  Switching to another
distribution is a painful process.


I`m saying that Fedora shines with reliability because I have not had a
single crash or freeze since I switched to Fedora over a year ago.  And
I`m saying "so far" because it`s only a bit over a year now since I
switched.  And twenty years is a long time.  I`d be happy to use Fedora
for the next twenty years.  Will Fedora be up to that kind of challenge?

But I find the reliability I`ve seen so far with Fedora very exciting
and I am very thankful for it.  It is a great accomplishment of Fedora.

So Fedora works.  I had to make a pick when I kicked Debian out, and
since someone had told me about Fedora, I looked at the web pages and
decided to try it.  It has it`s disadvantages and quirks and stuff I
really don`t like, but it works.

Fedora is great.  I put it on the same hardware I had Debian on and was
immediately impressed that things are running a lot faster than they
used to.  I was really pissed when the upgrade from F17 to F18 failed
--- or seemed to fail because there was no indication of any progress
during the application of SELinux policy rules, which lead me to press
the reset button after an hour or two --- but it was possible to repair
the damage.  And repairing the damage was less painful than switching to
another distribution.

So yes, Fedora is great, and I`m impressed, and I have to come to like
it.  I know why I`m using it, and you could even say "I just picked this
and it`s fine".

But I picked it after good consideration, and the consideration does not
stop at some point.  And I do care: If it should become not upgradeable
or unbearably unreliable at some point, I`ll kick it out just like
Debian.  I don`t need a recipe for failure, I need my computer to work.

> Also: the base OS has developed to the point where it has become
> uninteresting.

Perhaps not: It is possible that the expectations have
changed.

Ten years ago people were probably much more willing to accept that
their soft- or hardware doesn`t work and that their computer crashes or
freezes every now and then than they are willing to accept this
nowadays.  Some people still don`t care.

Look at different distributions and you may find that they are all using
more or less the same software.  It doesn`t matter whether I use
distribution X or Z or V, they all come, for example, with emacs, and if
not, I`ll just compile it myself.

People probably expect things like that.  But fail to be great by making
a distribution that crashes/freezes their computer every now and then,
and people will not use it.

People use this or that distribution because it`s great.  Only their
expectations have changed and they don`t notice anymore that what they
are using is great.  They take it for granted.

And by not paying attention, they create their own recipes for failure.
Emacs is great, but when the rest of the system doesn`t work, I cannot
do what I actually do.

So let people see how Fedora is great, and remind them.  You could
consider it a point in which Fedora has (and other distributions have)
failed that people think it doesn`t matter which distribution they are
using.

> In turn, this leads to a shift in the balance between the effort to
> get software into a distribution and the reward of doing so. It used
> to be that if you had open source software, and you could convince the
> distros to get your get your software into a distro, that’s how you
> knew that you had arrived.

I have always wondered how people manage to create packages, for Debian
or Fedora.  I looked into it because I would like to provide packages,
and I found it requires an insurmountable effort.  You start with "I
have written this software" and get to "I would like that ppl use it,
and to make that easy, I`d like to make a package".  Then you try to
find out how to do that and that`s where it ends:  It`s just too
difficult.

Instead, you put your software on github.

> I’m really big into the idea of incremental improvement. As long as we
> have a plan and are going forward and making some difference each
> release, that’s good. I know this sometimes makes people working on
> new ideas frustrated — for example, removing sendmail from the default
> install. I’m happy to get sendmail out of there, and I think it
> doesn’t belong for a lot of cases, but if it takes us two or three
> releases to remove it, eh, it’s okay.

That decision came across as "removing an MTA from the default
install".  I don`t know if you`re saying that something is now replacing
sendmail or that there is no MTA when you do a default install.

If it`s the latter, no MTA at all, then it was a very bad decision.  A
system without MTA is not functional.


> So that’s part of what Fedora.next is: to look at our mission and
> decide what more we need to do to make it happen.

Let me simply ask what "community" is supposed to mean in the mission
statement (which I can`t quote here because it`s an image).

I am asking this because nowadays, everything is a "community", to the
point where that word doesn`t mean anything anymore.  What, who and
where is this "community" in this case, who are the members of it and
how does one become a member?

The mission statement seems to say that "the Fedora Project" itself is a
"community", one that is "collaborative".  Isn`t being "collaborative"
implied in being a "community"?  I wouldn`t say that all "communities"
are necessarily "collaborative" --- yet in this case being
"collaborative" looks like it could be a very substantial factor,
constituting "community" in the first place, bringing some redundancy
about the mission statement.

Without redundancy, the statement may boil down to "let`s advance
FOSS".  The point of Fedora.next would then be to figure out how to do
that "better" than before.

What does that have to do with a Linux distribution called Fedora?  The
next step might be to cease making a Linux distribution so that the
freed resources may be dedicated to other activities which more
efficiently, i. e. "better", "advance FOSS".

Like you said, nobody cares anymore what distribution they are using,
and it`s a topic that has become /really/ boring --- so why not do
something exciting that more efficiently advances FOSS than making one?

> Most everything we are talking about in Fedora.next is additive. We’re
> not saying that you can’t do certain things in Fedora anymore, but we
> are saying that we may need to add some things to make the goals of
> the mission come true.

I seriously don`t like this statement.  I don`t like it not because it
brings about the very idea it seems to be denying but because I don`t
like the idea it brings about.

That`s a political strategy, telling people that "we" aren`t going to do
what "we" are going to do because "we" are going to do something
else.  What actually goes on then remains unnoticed, and not long after
every time after having seen or heard this statement, you look back and
see that what the "we" said they wouldn`t do is what they actually did.

I don`t buy that anymore.

> Of course, we also need to look at how we can make what we are doing
> well even better, possibly by changing some of our focus and certainly
> by improving our processes.

Listen to the users, if you want to make a better distribution.

> No one has really been able to successfully make software which goes
> on top of Fedora and keeps up. Can we make that easier in some way?

Well, I have.  It`s running here right now, since F17.  I`d make a
package if it was easy to make one ...

> Maybe we could do a better job by letting people put their packages in

Assuming that they can make packages ...

> to some level in an easier way, and then after they’re included in the
> project look at improving them. (Update This is actually in progress
> in the Enviroment and Stacks Working Group now, in the “Fedora
> Playground” repository. Cool!) And maybe also, we could focus more on
> packages where it really matters that they’re packaged well, and
> decide that with others, well, eh, that’s probably going to be crap
> forever and we’ll do what we can to make it as useful as possible to
> people.

All packages need to be packaged well.  I don`t mind having additional
repos with crappy packages that need to be explicitly enabled.

But making crappy packages the standard obsoletes having packages
(beyond a minimal set that gets you started) because you`re better off
pulling the sources and compiling them yourself, rather than installing
a crappy package with which you have no way of knowing what it might
mess up.


Hm.  After reading the article, I still don`t really understand what
Fedora.next is about.  It seems to try to somehow put together some
questions like "How can FOSS be advanced more efficiently?", "What can
be done to make Fedora a better distribution for everyone?", "Do we want
more people to use Fedora?", "How do we get more software into Fedora?",
"How do we get more people to contribute?", "How can we decide what we
want?" and "How can we struggle less to get what we want?".

I think I`d like to see an article with questions like this which lays
out what answers to these questions are currently in place.  There
probably aren`t very many people who know the current answers.  Such an
article would also need to explain for each question why it is necessary
to ask it now.


-- 
Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug)