FC4 state of affairs and FC5

[Gilboa Davara]

On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 21:16 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Gilboa Davara wrote:
> 
> This is largely a matter of perception. While many of the development 
> ideas get discussed in various lists and you see the result of the 
> development in the form of rawhide reports and new code, bug reports 
> tend to be fixed in a more resilent way. Logging into #fedorabot IRC 
> channel tends to give you a better idea of whats going on. Fedora 
> Bugzilla recently got a RSS feed feature when it works properly would 
> enable anyone to get the reports in a better way. I have also been 
> throwing out the idea of a bugs list for all the incoming reports, 
> comments and status changes in a equivalent way to the cvs commits list
> 

Having better ways to follow up on bugs (RSS, etc) is a good thing, but
it doesn't really help, once a bug report is being lost "in the system".
(Like the gpilot and gdb issues.)
On one hand, these bugs seem critical in my eyes but in the other hand,
I really don't want to burden the maintainer by reopening the bug
reports or reporting a new bug reports.

> 
> Fedora Project does not push out new ISO images after a release has been 
> made. IIUC intermediate ISO images are considered a large amount of 
> burden in form of increased bandwidth usage for mirror maintainers

This leads to a rather big problem of losing users. 
Please check my answer to Alan Cox.

> If you consider it critical enough, you can request a update for FC4 in 
> the reports have you made.

I/we did. 
But it seems (assuming we didn't screw anything) that our questions left
unanswered.

> Fedora Foundation does not exist as of today but you can get my 
> independent opinion. Development isnt orthogonal to bug fixes. Active 
> development includes bug fixes many of which can potentially be released 
> as updated on the FC4/3 branches as required.  While there is no 
> guarantee that all of the bugs that you come across will get fixed 
> within the time frame that would ideal for you, bugs are getting fixed 
> nevertheless.

I full heatedly agree. (My original post included two such a reports.)
However, what does the FC user to do, once he hits a stone-wall? A
critical bug that seems to go under the radar?
Do remember that going back to FC3 is problematic. Not only you lose
features, FC3 is slowly nearing it EOL. Which leaves you in a choosing
the lesser bad-like problem.

> 
> There are many other bugs like the installation crashes on some chipsets 
> or the Xorg display issue which are relatively wide spread. This goes 
> back to the question of whether we consider it appropriate it to have 
> new ISO images between releases but you dont really need to wait for 
> Fedora to do it. You can do this yourself along with anyone else who 
> considers it important. see 
> http://fedoranews.org/contributors/gene_czarcinski/update_distro/

This is a task well beyond most users. Most of them will either quit and
switch distribution or worse, go back to Windows XP and never look back.

> Putting a bugzilla comment would get you the maintainer's opinion on this.
> 

Maybe my own fault... but it didn't really help.
Questions about the gpilotd and the python-gtksourceview bugs left
unanswered. 

> If you wish to contribute take a look at the help wanted[1] page or 
> especially at Fedora Bug Squad[2] efforts. There are many mentors[3] who 
> are willing to help you get started with this. As someone who spend many 
> days triaging hundreds of bugs, I would certainly appreciate your 
> participation

I will do so.