What Seriously Ails Fedora

[Robin Laing]

On 2015-05-28 21:15, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> On 05/28/2015 03:21 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
>>
>> What you're saying is, in effect, that boost 1.54 breaks backward
>> compatibility and boost-terminal isn't going to get upgraded.
>
> Yes.
>
>> Isn't it
>> up to boost's maintainer to see to it that this doesn't become an issue?
>
> How?  boost-terminal isn't in the hypothetical current release, so
> there's nothing to check.
>
>> One of the problems the OSS community keeps
>> pointing to in commercial software is the way newer versions of programs
>> fail to read or write files in formats that older versions understand,
>> while bragging that their packages don't suffer from that fault.  Has
>> this changed, or is it simply a case of sloppy testing?
>
> Nothing has changed.  The advantage of Free Software has never been that
> nothing ever changes, or that software is backward compatible forever.
> The advantage is that if *you* need backward compatibility, or to be
> able to read files in old formats, or any other need, then you have the
> right and the ability to make that happen.  You have the right to change
> your software to do what you need.  If you lack the skill, you can hire
> someone who has it.  With proprietary software, you do not have the
> right, and you very often don't have the technical information required
> to make such a thing happen anyway.

Talking about this today at work with the release of F22.

Software ages and people leave projects.  Some projects get forked and 
the original stalls or dies but the fork continues.  A bug report can 
get that package to replace the present one.

In some cases, the various forks come together again as is happening 
with parchive.

How many people in the Windows world are upset because their old Office 
won't work on their fancy new Windows 8 computer?  I know enough.

I also have run into the upgrade issue and previous "Must Have" 
application is not there anymore or stopped due to a dependency.  In 
most cases, it is around, just not maintained.

There are times when you have to drop the demand of backwards 
compatibility.  I have seen it in Linux where something updates and 
there are tools to convert all old data files to the new format provided 
in the package or third party.

I have thrown out stacks of disks with files that there are not 
documentation on the file format.  Heck, I cannot even remember the 
programs that wrote the files.  But that is part of life.  I have stacks 
of films at work that I cannot process due to no working equipment 
anymore and no funds to buy something that will work.

I know that Fedora is a short lived version system.  No expectations of 
it working the same way in the years down the road but it provides the 
tools and flexibility to make me more productive.

I used Fedup on three machines with minor issues.  One machine I cannot 
get to update due to the firewall and bandwidth throttling at work.  I 
think Fedup is a great improvement to the older days of clean install 
with each new version to ensure things were clean and to go through the 
previous saved installed package list to re-install all the applications.

My only complaint on upgrades is that Fedup is slow in comparison to a 
clean install but then all your applications are also installed so I 
guess it may be long but it is easier.  :)

There are easier Linux versions out there and I know some computer 
non-experts that use Mint with great success and are very happy.  I hear 
less from them now than when they had Windows installed.

One issue I do find that says Fedora isn't cutting edge is when some new 
major releases of applications do come out shortly after the current 
Fedora release, they are not upgraded in Fedora.

To all the maintainers, thank you.