WTF? Inaccessible bug reports?

[Olivier Galibert]

[Sent it personally instead of to the list by mistake]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 06:06:54PM +0100, Lubomir Kundrak wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2007-11-20 at 15:51 +0100, Olivier Galibert wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 08:26:47AM -0600, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > > Perhaps you should calm down a bit.  Flying off the handle before
> > > asking if the bug permissions can be changed or an explanation is
> > > provided is probably not going to be very productive.
> > 
> > Well, sorry.  Fedora becomes worse for my use with each release I try,
> > and I'm starting to get really annoyed at that, because it used to be
> > so much better.
> 
> May I ask what's "your use"?

My use is a team in a lab with 100-200 machines, about 30 of them
physically on people's desktops, about 80 in two oscar clusters.  Some
of the people could do system administration, some couldn't, most
don't want to anyway.

Since I ended up as sysadmin-by-default, I need a distribution which I
can install and update with a minimum amount of fussing, and where the
installation has pretty much everything the users are going to need.

At fedora core 3 times, things were reasonably nice.  You could do an
everything install, test it for a while to see what was missing and/or
broken, put the packages and the additionally needed ones in a local
network repository and go.  And you would be ok for two years.

At fedora core 5 times, Everything was lost.  Thankfully it is still
in kickstart, but it makes the initial testing phase more annoying.
Way more problematic is the support time which went down to one year.

At fedora 7 time, Core was mostly lost.  There is still the list of
package on the DVD as a guideline though, but there isn't a separate
updates directory you can easily merge in anymore.  To the point that
I didn't find the time to do the new installation before 8 was out.

Now we're at 8 and I want to try to move to it, but static ip support
is fucked, and the list of packages on the DVD doesn't even have tcsh,
which 50% of the people here use.  Installing from the DVD by checking
all 3 options at the top level doesn't even give you make or gcc,
which is kind of annoying when the reason for installing interactively
in the first place is to have everything needed to hack on anaconda to
fix the static ip issue.  An yum install '*' conflicts all the way due
to the multilib crap.

And that's before anybody has even started to *use* the distribution.

Fedora makes me think of E.R., at times.  In the first seasons the
show was about the hospital, and found its public.  Then they seem to
have decided try to extend its viewership by adding a lot on
interpersonal relationships to the point of forgetting the hospital
part.  The old public left, not having what they wanted anymore, and
the potential new one stayed with Gray's Anatomy, which does
relationships much better.  And the viewership is crashing down.

Fedora was originally nice for people coming from an Unix background,
where 50% of the windows on the screen are xterms.  It seems to have
collectively decided that it should instead cater to the Windows kind
of people, to the detriment of the Unix ones.  A default installation
does not have a compiler.  Everything looking slightly technical is
hidden as much as possible.  Easily understandable and editable text
configuration files are routinely replaced by an obfuscated xml-based
registry[1] with automatically generated GUIs from hell[2].  Basic
things like static ips and routes are considered legacy and their
support totally untested and/or considered unimportant.  And
significantly every comparison is done with Ubuntu, the epitome of the
windowsian-come-here distributions, and never with Debian or Gentoo.

Keep cranking up the pain, guys, and fedora will definitively makes
its place in the "master of none" category.

It's kinda sad that people who do such a good job upstream end up
building such a crappier-over-time distribution from it.

  OG.

[1] gconf I'm looking at you

[2] The only thing worse than a GUI designed by a computer scientist
    is a GUI automatically generated from a format description.