gnome-vfs not in Rawhide?

[John Thacker]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 08:05:07PM -0400, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
> Because it is a library. Users don't use libraries, they use apps
> to perform tasks. Now, I can see how we can switch an app (say
> XMMS) with another one that allows the user to perform the same
> task. That's OK. But users alo use apps that we don't distribute, 
> and it's *those* that we shouldn't break. If we expect users to use
> *only* the apps we ship, then you'd be right. But in that case
> we wouldn't have a platform, because we accept a priori that the
> user will never use other apps.

But users also use apps that have binary kernel modules that we
don't distribute.

They used VMWare and NVidia drivers that didn't work on kernel
2.6.  Did we:
1) Ship 2.6 and expect the binary providers to catch up, or
2) Not ship something that would break the binaries, or
3) Dual ship 2.6 and 2.4, and continue to dual ship them, as
   people might still have the older versions around and want to use them?
   What if they paid for an old version of VMWare that doesn't work on
   kernel 2.6 and they want to run it on the new Fedora Core, and
   don't want to be "forced to upgrade?"

Similarly, we expected people to have to do 
export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5, etc., because their old apps (like
acroread4) wouldn't work otherwise.  That seems pretty hard for a newbie
to figure out; I've had to tell people about it.  They don't like
their apps suddenly breaking on upgrade.

Basically every release has broken binary applications.  RedHat has
been the traditional *leader* in breaking apps, in fact.  Most of
the rest of the argument I could make was eloquently explained by
Toshio.

John Thacker
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