Announcing Fedora Activity Day - Fedora Development Cycle 2009

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Sorry, was quite busy with other stuff over the past few days and didn't
get around to answer this

On 03.06.2009 02:15, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 01:08:15AM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>>> It IMHO shows a big and more and more pressing problem in Fedora:
>>> Packagers and leadership are not working towards the same direction.
>> The best solution for that is to change the leadership. :-) So don't vote
>> for the same old hats for FESCo and FPB.
> 
> Honestly, that is pretty short-sighted.  And Thorsten's statement isn't
> entirely accurate either.  Entirely new FESCo and FPB would still be faced with
> the same problems we have today.
> 
> Let's look at in a bit more detail.
> 
> 1) I don't recall ever seeing FESCo or FPB state as a committee that they want
> fewer packages and updates.  If you have a mailing list post to meeting minutes
> that say that, I would be happy to look at it.

In short: And that from my point of view is exactly the leadership problem.

The verbose version: Fedora obviously has a problem here as some
packagers follow a (kind of) debian like update scheme while others are
more rolling release scheme. That's bad, as those users that prefer to
get the latest version of the software as regular update are not
satisfied, as some packages stay on old versions; neither are those that
prefer "old, but stable", as they sometimes can't avoid to update to new
versions for security reasons (Note that this is the very long story
very short and without lots of details/special cases where doing either
the first or the second is the better thing to do).

The policy that FESCo worked out a few months didn't help much. In fact
it's so vague that it's IMHO more confusing then helpful. Not to forget
Jesse (as rel-eng lead in a quite important position) and his "quest
to reduce the number of updates" (which he gave up -- see earlier this
thread), which likely made some packagers wonder "is it right how I do it"?

A real leader/leading group would have said guided people better. Like
"This is how we want to do it [...], here are a few examples that will
help to understand [...]". Or even better: work out a overall solution
that changes Fedora into a distribution that satisfies both users groups
mentioned above: those that prefer older, but stable packages and those
that prefer newer packages, but avoid rawhide because it's to dangerous.

> [...]

Cu
knurd