OpenOffice 3.1

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Tue May 12 23:09:09 UTC 2009


On Tue, 2009-05-12 at 17:47 -0500, Matthew Woehlke wrote:

> For what it's worth, I agree with Adam, to the extent that I read "work 
> optimally" as "work without excessive friction in the community". 
> Deviate from either one, and it becomes too much a judgment call, and 
> people's judgment is going to vary, and you have a mess.
> 
> That said... I also agree that "a middle ground is needed"*. 
> Unfortunately, that means living with threads like this one is likely 
> inevitable.
> 
> (* Yes, Adam, even after reading your reply. I don't want /any/ kind of 
> free-for-all. I want some general exercise of discretion. OTOH, I do 
> think we need to be clear that we're not in the "bugfix-only" camp.)

To be honest I'm more or less expecting that's where we'll end up, but
I'm trying to make it extremely clear what the consequences are. :)
Anything that claims to be in the middle ground is far, far, far more to
the 'anything goes' side of the ledger than it is the 'really stable'
side of the ledger. The *only* system that works for Aunt Flo is
conservative updates, because the Aunt Flo-type user needs a system that
works today how it worked yesterday. Aunt Flo is going to call you if
her Internet button (that's what she calls the Firefox launcher) changes
color. Or, y'know, moves.

I don't recommend Fedora to Aunt Flo, I wouldn't install Fedora on
systems owned by my personal Aunt Flo's (come on, everyone has some.
Mine get Mandriva. Or, frankly, Windows. Yours might get Ubuntu. Doesn't
matter.) I think that's fine. We don't need to be everything to
everyone. But as long as we're going to wind up with an update system
which allows anything but minimal fixes to be pushed as official
updates, Fedora isn't going to be for Aunt Flo, and we need to be up
front about that. We need to tell people that, if they want a quiet
life, if they're installing on a non-geek friend's system, if they're
running a server, they should use something more appropriate to their
goals. And any argument on this list (or anywhere else) which relies on
Aunt Flo-type users to support it should be shot down with extreme
prejudice. Basically, if we're not caring about Aunt Flo, we should be
consistent about that. :)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list