Leaving?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 09:25 +0200, Florian La Roche wrote:
> > This is not meant as some kinda blackmail to stop the Xorg 7.1 update,
> > to be honest at this point I don't care about the 7.1 update anymore.
> > And as I said when I started the target audience discussion this was
> > never about the 7.1 update. Its about the principle of not knowingly
> > having a yum update during a stable release breaks peoples systems,
> > especially not with a smile on your face and saying behind those end
> > users backs that will teach them not to use binary crap. Because that
> > _IS_ what is happening here. Sure there are many advancements in xorg
> > 7.1 and I'm not suggesting to leave it out FC-6 even if the binary
> > drivers aren't available at FC-6 launch time, but breaking stuff with
> > TOTAL disregard to a large group of end users, during a stable's release
> > lifetime is IMHO unacceptable. And what worries me is not this single
> > instance of breaking, its the attitude behind it and the ease with which
> > we (you?) step over the all of a sudden minor problem of seriously
> > hurting a significant group of end users.
ACK.

> How we move to new versions is a very difficult topic. I though we
> get way more pushback when we started updating e.g. mysql to newest
> upstream versions within FC-updates and really did bigger jumps there.
> But I think overall the majority also liked getting newest versions
> if not too many regressions were added. It does seem to work for mysql
> right now.
> 
> With graphics drivers we really need to get moving and improve the
> number of supported cards. I am not too familiar with the xorg devel
> community, but my impression was that hacking on drivers is not the
> easiest thing todo. So yes, I also don't like seeing regressions
> getting introduced, but on the other hand if Fedora is a vehicle to
> get more testing back for xorg and hopefully also contribute to grow
> the xorg devel community to move on, that would be a really good
> goal for Fedora Core.

Well, to me, the main point is Fedora leadership, Fedora management and
strategic decisions, and their interaction with the community rsp. lack
of thereof.

At least I sense political and ideological interests (ab-) using Fedora
as a vehicle for their selfish interests and positions. That said, you
can't separate technical and political issue as far as Fedora is
concerned. To me, this current issue is nothing but a religious crusade,
which can will cause many collateral casualties amongst users and is not
unlikely to be harmful to the distro.

> I'd see the binary driver items only as secondary discussion point,
> but know how things get really political then. Main point is on how
> to grow xorg stability and number of supported cards.
The binary/proprietary driver issue is a old as Linux. Nowadays it's ATI
and Nvidia, in the early days it had been others. IMO, there has not
been any substantial progress on this matter ever since linux exists.
So far, only in very rare occasions previous such "driver crusades" had
been successful to a measurable extend, but ... the times have changed,
the Linux hype is over ...

Ralf