Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 08/08/2009 10:34 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote: Rahul Sundaram wrote: As already explained, stable in the sense of things that work the same (No big UI changes etc). When did we push *big* UI changes in a KDE update? Big UI changes is an *example* but if you are going to argue that none of the KDE updates ever changed the user experience including the interface significantly then I guess we got to disagree on that. Rahul -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Jesse Keatingjkeat...@redhat.com wrote: On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 07:38 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote: I don't draw the line, the maintainers of each package draw their own line. I just sit back and comfortably sip on my mai tai while the people who know best make the proper decisions. But you obviously have a personal line somewhere. Where is your line that you're willing to take latest upstream builds, but won't move to rawhide? For me, as I explained earlier, I take each package I maintain on a case by case basis. However it's basically one simple rule: If it is going to cause a bunch of new bugs to be reported which I have to deal with then I wont release for non-rawhide or stable Fedoras. Otherwise, I generally try to keep all supported Fedora versions up to date with the packages I maintain. Although I have to admit I've been slacking off in the past few months... -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
drago01 wrote: OK, good to hear that, means that this time no patches to compiz-kde are needed. Hopefully. For 4.2, there were some changes in KWin internals which needed patching too. Kevin Kofler -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Friday 07 August 2009 04:21:56 Adam Williamson wrote: On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 12:30 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 12:06 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: OK, bad example, but you know what I mean. Yes, I do, and I think there is room for a Fedora offering that is released frequently (every 6 months), supported for about a year, with conservative updates to the platform. That's nearly exactly what we have in Fedora Desktop. There is also room for a Fedora offering that is released frequently (every 6 months), supported for about a year, with aggressive updates to the latest and greatest for the platform. That's nearly exactly what we have in Fedora KDE. The real problem is going to be when somebody wants to make an offering that features GNOME but has aggressive updates to latest and greatest GNOME on every update stream, as that cannot coexist with the conservative Fedora Desktop. The other problem is if you'd like stable updates but you prefer KDE, or vice versa =) Why do you expect that updating to the latest KDE means unstable system? ;-) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- Jaroslav Řezník jrez...@redhat.com Associate Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno Office: +420 532 294 275 Mobile: +420 731 455 332 Red Hat, Inc. http://cz.redhat.com/ -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Friday 07 August 2009 10:42:35 Rahul Sundaram wrote: On 08/07/2009 01:35 PM, Jaroslav Reznik wrote: The other problem is if you'd like stable updates but you prefer KDE, or vice versa =) Why do you expect that updating to the latest KDE means unstable system? ;-) As already explained, stable in the sense of things that work the same (No big UI changes etc). We are not talking about robustness here although new updates has the potential to cause issues there as well. But that means Fedora is totally unstable - as we're forcing users every year to survive much more bigger changes. Fedora is really very inconsistent between releases. This is case where continual updates can avoid it. Maybe we're lacking some vision farther then +1 release, not only in Fedora, but in all OSS projects... Jaroslav Rahul -- Jaroslav Řezník jrez...@redhat.com Associate Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno Office: +420 532 294 275 Mobile: +420 731 455 332 Red Hat, Inc. http://cz.redhat.com/ -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 08/07/2009 04:48 PM, Jaroslav Reznik wrote: On Friday 07 August 2009 10:42:35 Rahul Sundaram wrote: On 08/07/2009 01:35 PM, Jaroslav Reznik wrote: The other problem is if you'd like stable updates but you prefer KDE, or vice versa =) Why do you expect that updating to the latest KDE means unstable system? ;-) As already explained, stable in the sense of things that work the same (No big UI changes etc). We are not talking about robustness here although new updates has the potential to cause issues there as well. But that means Fedora is totally unstable - as we're forcing users every year to survive much more bigger changes. No it does not. New releases bringing in changes is expected. Updates changing behaviour, much less so. Rahul -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
2009/8/5 Matthias Clasen mcla...@redhat.com: If we just want to dump all the latest stuff in there, why bother with freezes and releases at all ? We could all just use rawhide... While often repeated, I don't think that argument is true. Some people (including me) like the idea of having a 'rolling release', but that's *not* the same as running rawhide. Even in a 'rolling release' scenario, packages would be in a 'staging area first for a while for testing, before being moved to the main repo. And back to the topic, afaik the KDE 4.3 packages have indeed been tested (via kde-redhat/testing etc) before being thrown on the f10 f11 users. - Thomas -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
2009/8/7 Thomas Moschny thomas.mosc...@gmail.com: 2009/8/5 Matthias Clasen mcla...@redhat.com: If we just want to dump all the latest stuff in there, why bother with freezes and releases at all ? We could all just use rawhide... While often repeated, I don't think that argument is true. Some people (including me) like the idea of having a 'rolling release', but that's *not* the same as running rawhide. Even in a 'rolling release' scenario, packages would be in a 'staging area first for a while for testing, before being moved to the main repo. And back to the topic, afaik the KDE 4.3 packages have indeed been tested (via kde-redhat/testing etc) before being thrown on the f10 f11 users. Indeed. Even the RCs up to 4.2.98 have been tested via the kde-redhat repo, bugs filed and fixed. I'm one of them who run always the latest and greatest from kde-redhat. -- LG Thomas Dubium sapientiae initium -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 6:33 PM, Jesse Keatingjkeat...@redhat.com wrote: On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 17:47 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote: Yea well, I dunno about you guys who run rawhide. But as an F-11 user, I am *very* glad I use KDE and the KDE SIG is giving me the latest and greatest to use. I am so glad I don't have to wait for F-12 to be released just to run the latest version of my desktop. Thank you once again KDE SIG for your awesome support and maintainership, it is second to none. So you want rawhide-like treatment for some of your packages, but not all of them? Where is the line? I don't draw the line, the maintainers of each package draw their own line. I just sit back and comfortably sip on my mai tai while the people who know best make the proper decisions. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Friday 07 August 2009 14:05:25 Thomas Janssen wrote: And back to the topic, afaik the KDE 4.3 packages have indeed been tested (via kde-redhat/testing etc) before being thrown on the f10 f11 users. Indeed. Even the RCs up to 4.2.98 have been tested via the kde-redhat repo, bugs filed and fixed. I'm one of them who run always the latest and greatest from kde-redhat. I am one of those who test kde packages both from kde-redhat and from rawhide. In every case the packages appeared first in rawhide, later in unstable of kde-redhat and only later on updates-testing, by the time the packages are submitted to updates they have passed all those different levels of testing. Do not forget also the update to emacs 23.1 made recently. Before that I always tried the repos who had emacs compiled for the latest Fedora stable version. I was glad when I saw the latest emacs available for F-11. -- José Abílio -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 08/06/2009 10:24 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: so if a package does get an 'adventurous' update then hits a security bug, there's no way to have a separate update without the adventurous change but with the security bug fixed so, two separate issues: one is making the updates, the other is solving for them. I only meant that with tags you could potentially solve for available updates within a single repo. I'm not sure you could _make_ a 'Solid' spin unless there was a Solid update path to work off. Right, to do that we'd need a SIG interested in making sure there was one. Some package developers/maintainers would probably join, others wouldn't be interested. It's probably not necessary to have all of Fedora in such a spin, but where there are users there tends to be interest. -Bill -- Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 http://www.bfccomputing.com/Cell: 603.252.2606 Twitter, etc.: bill_mcgonigle Page: 603.442.1833 Email, IM, VOIP: b...@bfccomputing.com Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 08/06/2009 08:57 PM, Ben Boeckel wrote: Just a thought, but could that SIG just enforce a critical path- like workflow (with overrides from the security team) on FN-2? They would have to be willing to do the QA, talk with SIGs and maintainers, and be large enough to be able to do so. Thoughts? I'm not sure FN-2 always qualifies as stable. For instance, I've seen major sound and video breakage in F11 - that wouldn't make a good base for a stable distro when F13 is branching _just_ because it's two back. On the other hand, one can juggle kernel versions/options, drivers, disable PulseAudio, etc. as required to achieve stable - though work better suited for a project than random thoughts in this e-mail. ;) -Bill -- Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 http://www.bfccomputing.com/Cell: 603.252.2606 Twitter, etc.: bill_mcgonigle Page: 603.442.1833 Email, IM, VOIP: b...@bfccomputing.com Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 07:38 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote: I don't draw the line, the maintainers of each package draw their own line. I just sit back and comfortably sip on my mai tai while the people who know best make the proper decisions. But you obviously have a personal line somewhere. Where is your line that you're willing to take latest upstream builds, but won't move to rawhide? -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 07:38 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote: On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 6:33 PM, Jesse Keatingjkeat...@redhat.com wrote: On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 17:47 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote: Yea well, I dunno about you guys who run rawhide. But as an F-11 user, I am *very* glad I use KDE and the KDE SIG is giving me the latest and greatest to use. I am so glad I don't have to wait for F-12 to be released just to run the latest version of my desktop. Thank you once again KDE SIG for your awesome support and maintainership, it is second to none. So you want rawhide-like treatment for some of your packages, but not all of them? Where is the line? I don't draw the line, the maintainers of each package draw their own line. I just sit back and comfortably sip on my mai tai while the people who know best make the proper decisions. Hmm, you sound like a GNOME user ;) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Jesse Keating wrote: On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 07:38 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote: I don't draw the line, the maintainers of each package draw their own line. I just sit back and comfortably sip on my mai tai while the people who know best make the proper decisions. But you obviously have a personal line somewhere. Where is your line that you're willing to take latest upstream builds, but won't move to rawhide? For me, that's easy. I don't want updates that the packagers don't consider stable. It sure sounds to me like Christopher feels the same way. I am willing to take the latest upstream builds because the maintainer considers them safe. I am not willing to use rawhide because it's considered a free-for-all. (I don't use updates-testing either, which IMO if I slurped everything relevant from updates-testing, would be about the same thing as using rawhide.) -- Matthew Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies. -- Thank you for reading all the way to this .sig. You may stop reading now. Really. It is safe to stop. There is no more content. Why are you still reading? -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 11:05 -0500, Matthew Woehlke wrote: For me, that's easy. I don't want updates that the packagers don't consider stable. It sure sounds to me like Christopher feels the same way. I am willing to take the latest upstream builds because the maintainer considers them safe. I am not willing to use rawhide because it's considered a free-for-all. (I don't use updates-testing either, which IMO if I slurped everything relevant from updates-testing, would be about the same thing as using rawhide.) So if rawhide had an updates-testing like repo, you wouldn't mind using it? -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Jesse Keating wrote: On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 11:05 -0500, Matthew Woehlke wrote: For me, that's easy. I don't want updates that the packagers don't consider stable. It sure sounds to me like Christopher feels the same way. I am willing to take the latest upstream builds because the maintainer considers them safe. I am not willing to use rawhide because it's considered a free-for-all. (I don't use updates-testing either, which IMO if I slurped everything relevant from updates-testing, would be about the same thing as using rawhide.) So if rawhide had an updates-testing like repo, you wouldn't mind using it? If that put an end to stuff like 'sorry, that last glibc rpm bricks your system if you have the misfortune of installing it'... maybe. As I said, right now my line is packages that the maintainers consider stable. If rawhide became that (and some new rawhide-testing or such for the current free-for-all), then I suppose I might use it. I'd also ask how that differs in any significant way from a rolling release. To be clear, 1. I would be in favor of a rolling release system, and 2. development /needs/ a free for all environment. So please don't take the above as being in any way opposed to such an environment existing... just so long as I can opt out of it ;-). Oh, and on a related note, it would be really helpful if it was possible to enable updates-testing only for certain packages (and when needed, dependencies thereof) on a permanent whitelist basis. -- Matthew Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies. -- Thank you for reading all the way to this .sig. You may stop reading now. Really. It is safe to stop. There is no more content. Why are you still reading? -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 12:21 -0500, Matthew Woehlke wrote: If that put an end to stuff like 'sorry, that last glibc rpm bricks your system if you have the misfortune of installing it'... maybe. As I said, right now my line is packages that the maintainers consider stable. If rawhide became that (and some new rawhide-testing or such for the current free-for-all), then I suppose I might use it. I'd also ask how that differs in any significant way from a rolling release. To be clear, 1. I would be in favor of a rolling release system, and 2. development /needs/ a free for all environment. So please don't take the above as being in any way opposed to such an environment existing... just so long as I can opt out of it ;-). Well with the no frozen rawhide proposal, from the Alpha freeze point on there would be such an updates-testing for the pending release, while rawhide remains the wild west. You could say install F12, then at F13 Alpha jump onto F13 and have the much newer more often content that has had some testing. Just keep jumping to the next Alpha and you have your rolling release as it were. Oh, and on a related note, it would be really helpful if it was possible to enable updates-testing only for certain packages (and when needed, dependencies thereof) on a permanent whitelist basis. include=package in the yum conf for updates-testing. -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 10:43 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: Well with the no frozen rawhide proposal, from the Alpha freeze point on there would be such an updates-testing for the pending release, while rawhide remains the wild west. You could say install F12, then at F13 Alpha jump onto F13 and have the much newer more often content that has had some testing. Just keep jumping to the next Alpha and you have your rolling release as it were. Of course, that assumes that the 'jumping', ie preupgrade / upgrade are well supported and work smoothly... -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Jesse Keating wrote:
Well with the no frozen rawhide proposal, from the Alpha freeze point on
there would be such an updates-testing for the pending release, while
rawhide remains the wild west. You could say install F12, then at F13
Alpha jump onto F13 and have the much newer more often content that has
had some testing. Just keep jumping to the next Alpha and you have your
rolling release as it were.
How does that differ from the current situation (except for being a
little more bleeding)?
A true rolling release is install-once, update-forever. Yes you can more
or less do this with upgrade-via-yum, but it is still a large chunk of
effort at 6- or 12-month intervals.
Oh, and on a related note, it would be really helpful if it was possible
to enable updates-testing only for certain packages (and when needed,
dependencies thereof) on a permanent whitelist basis.
include=package in the yum conf for updates-testing.
Will that also use packages from -testing when needed to resolve
dependencies for something in the include list? Or will it just break?
('man yum.conf' makes it sound like the latter...)
--
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
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Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Jesse Keating wrote: We're providing a bunch of packages, that certain groups use to make a variety of operating systems. If you want to develop a tool and expect that it'll keep working on any given release without aggressive changes underneath, pick the Fedora Desktop operating system. If you want to run with the latest and greatest regardless of change risk, try the Fedora KDE operating system. The KDE libraries are backwards compatible, applications built against 4.2 (or even 4.1 or 4.0) will still work with 4.3. Kevin Kofler -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Adam Williamson wrote: It seems to happen rather a lot for that to be the case, though maybe the situation I'm most familiar with (KDE 4.0 - 4.1 - 4.2) is an unusual situation. I was watching KDE quite closely in MDV at that point, as quite a lot of features that people expected from 3.x were missing, and I remember, for instance, that someone was trying to get kmilo (for multimedia keys) working on 4.x, they had to port it to 4.0, then port it to 4.1, then to 4.2... That's a plasmoid, the ABI for libplasma wasn't stable until 4.2. (It is now, so plasmoids built for 4.2 still work with 4.3.) as I said, I suppose this could just be because 4.0 didn't quite have everything settled down yet so some major changes still had to be made for 4.1 / 4.2. I'm not enough of an expert on KDE to be sure. Right, Plasma still needed major changes there. The libraries used by regular applications kept binary compatibility though, an application built against 4.0 will still work with 4.3. Kevin Kofler -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Rahul Sundaram wrote: As already explained, stable in the sense of things that work the same (No big UI changes etc). When did we push *big* UI changes in a KDE update? We're even making sure the default Plasma theme in F10 and F11 stays Oxygen rather than switching to Air which is the new upstream default in 4.3 for this very reason. We also don't push major updates like Amarok 1-2 to stable releases (F9 stayed with 1.4 until EOL, F10 shipped with a beta of Amarok 2 and got updated to newer Amarok 2 builds). Kevin Kofler -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 05:37 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote: Adam Williamson wrote: I probably couldn't do much justice to a comprehensive plan as I have insufficient knowledge of how the buildsystem works. I was acting at a higher level - just trying to point out that it's essentially doomed to try and please everyone with a single update repository, that's not an argument anyone can win. Either the 'we want stable updates' camp or the 'we want shiny new stuff' camp is going to be disappointed. The problem is that your solution doubles maintainer and rel-eng workload. I think we really don't have the resources for that. Please don't personalize things. It's not 'mine', and it's not really a solution. I'm simply pointing out that it's literally impossible to satisfy both possible update policies with a single unitary repository. We either have to make it clear which policy we use and which policy we don't, and hence which theoretical user base we are not targeting, or take on extra work and try to satisfy both. I am not declaring myself in favor of, or against, any particular option. I'm just pointing out the parameters of the question. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 05:42 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote: Adam Williamson wrote: If we are - or _want to be_ - that kind of a distribution, we have to provide a stable update set so we can stop telling people who just want a distro to run Aunt Flo's desktop or their webserver or whatever on to run CentOS or Ubuntu instead. If, however, we really don't care about that kind of usage scenario and instead we want to focus only on being a kind of project for the prototyping of systems that will eventually _become_ components of that kind of generally usable operating system - which to my mind is more or less the status at the moment - it doesn't make any sense to provide a stable update set, it's not serving any real purpose, and it'd just be a waste of effort. Actually, I think our KDE updates are very much beneficial even to Aunt Flo type users. We wouldn't push them out if we thought otherwise. At this point you're getting down to update theory, which is a deeply unexciting area to most people, I suspect ;) The problem with that approach is that, in the conventional approach to updates, the key factor is _continuity_. You don't change behaviour or risk regressions. If an update fixes ten bugs but changes the behaviour of some component people see every day - which is a fairly accurate description of both KDE and GNOME point releases - it's not appropriate to be an update, in this theory, because it means the updated product is breaking the expectations of the the initial release. What your frazzled sysadmin cares about most is that things work on Tuesday the same way they did on Monday - even if that just means they're broken in the same way. If you can fix something without changing the fundamental behaviour of the system, great, but that's all. As I said, I'm not arguing in favour of or against any particular position. I'm just pointing out the angles here. There is a conventional approach to updates that many distributions use, and that some types of user expect and would like in any distribution they use. We can choose not to do this, and it's fine, I just want it to be clear where the 'edges' are. Right now, if you ask around in the conventional places - Fedora forums, Linuxquestions, distrowatch, IRC, places like that - people will tell you that, if what you want is a conventional stable operating system to run your servers or whatever on, that doesn't change from day to day, don't run Fedora, run CentOS (or Ubuntu or Debian or SUSE or...whatever they like). If we're happy with that, that's great. But it is worth being aware exactly what the status quo is. It seems like our current policy is more de facto than the result of any reasoned decision. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 23:05 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: The problem with that approach is that, in the conventional approach to updates, the key factor is _continuity_. You don't change behaviour or risk regressions. If an update fixes ten bugs but changes the behaviour of some component people see every day - which is a fairly accurate description of both KDE and GNOME point releases - it's not appropriate to be an update, in this theory, because it means the updated product is breaking the expectations of the the initial release. What your frazzled The kernel's a great example here, BTW. If we update F10 to kernel 2.6.29, the ATI proprietary driver will stop working. We don't care about proprietary software and yadda yadda yadda, but it's exactly the kind of behaviour change in a supposedly 'final' product that certain groups of users just don't want to have to deal with. It doesn't really matter that the driver's proprietary, even. The point is that an interface that could reasonably be expected not to change in a 'stable' operating system release, by conventional definitions, does change in Fedora. Similar with the changes from 2.6.29 to 2.6.31. If we were to bump F11 from 2.6.29 to 2.6.31, the NVIDIA proprietary driver and the rt2860sta wireless driver (and possibly other out-of-kernel network drivers, too...) would break. The kernel guys consider it fine to do this sort of breakage between point releases, and Fedora considers it fine to ship kernel point releases as updates for 'stable' releases (we've done this in the past, 2.6.29 is still planned for F10 - just stuck due to problems - and I don't see any indication we won't be doing the same for F11). Certain groups of users just don't want this hassle. They have enough pain getting their graphics card / wireless card / whatever bit of hardware working right _once_, they don't want to have to do it again every two months (or whenever the next kernel point release happens to come out). They figure, since it's a stable release, once they get something working it ought to _keep_ working. This is the scenario that's problematic as long as we don't have a reliable conservative update path available. Again, if we decide that's a hit we're willing to take, that's fine. To bring it back to where we came in, we have a problem in that the KDE team are following one policy (update to the latest KDE release on the basis that it brings in new shiny goodness and fixes more stuff than it breaks) while the GNOME team are following the other (don't go to the latest point release in the interest of consistency). This doesn't make sense - if some parts of the distro are going with the adventurous policy, it renders the caution of other parts essentially null and void. The caution of the GNOME team doesn't really work, overall, if the kernel is following the adventurous policy. Conservative users still aren't going to go with Fedora. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 12:58 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: All this really does is create a pseudo rawhide for each release, blurring the lines even more around why we even do releases. With a 6 month cycle, do we really want to take on all this extra headaches and hassles just so that you can have some newer experimental software a bit sooner, or without doing a wholesale update to the next release? For fedora-virt folks, we have a virt-preview repository, the general idea being: - a repo where you can pull f11 builds of the latest rawhide virt bits - purely for people who want to help with testing f12 virt, but aren't willing to run rawhide - it's not about making new features available to f11 users, it's about allowing f11 users to get involved with f12 development - if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces - we'll do our best to fix problems specific to this repo, but in reality we care more about problems which affect stock f11 or rawhide/f12 - we're trying to keep the limit the packages in the repo to purely virt related packages - e.g. right now we need something from f12 selinux-policy, but I'm hoping we can get added in an f11 update rather than pulling in the f12 version and breaking non-virt stuff It hasn't been around long, but it's working well and we're getting valuable testing from it. The only thing we're missing is that we can't add virt-preview packages to the buildroot. We're considering switching from koji to mock for the builds because of this. With a little automation, I think this model could work fairly well for the likes of GNOME. Cheers, Mark. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Le mercredi 05 août 2009 à 14:27 -0700, Adam Williamson a écrit : On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 13:03 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 12:58 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: It also would require multiple CVS branches, one for security, one for adventurous, as well as different buildroots to go along with those, since you wouldn't be able to build a security update for a gnome package against the newer adventurous gtk and expect it to work on the older GTK, likewise if you had to modify a gnome package to work with newer gtk, you dont' want those modifications in the way if/when you need to do a conservative security update for it later. Oh I forgot, you also need -testing versions of each of those repos, so for any release, you could have updates, updates-testing, experimental, and experimental-testing repo options and build targets and buildroot shuffling going on. WHAT FUN! Mandriva has a /testing repository for /updates, but not for /backports, on the basis that /backports is fundamentally unstable so you may as well just do your testing in the repo. This works fine, so far. Well, some people ( me to some extend ) are not really happy with this, because some users tends to auto upgrade even with /backports and then complaint when something is broken. Once you tell them this is backports, do not expect everything to be functionnal, they start to recommend to others to not use this repository, thus giving /backports a bad reputation because of a few bad apples. But having /testing for /backports would have been maybe too complex, indeed. We didn't found a good solution when we discussed last time. ( and this was also discussed to death on mandriva mailling list too ) -- Michael Scherer -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Adam Williamson wrote: the rt2860sta wireless driver Aren't there patches for that one already? As the driver is Free Software, it can be fixed. By the time 2.6.31 gets even to updates-testing, RPM Fusion will already have the patches. And, by the way, Fedora intentionally refuses to support out-of-tree kernel drivers, see also the FESCo decision some time ago to ban standalone kmod packages in Fedora and the rationale that was given (paraphrasing: we don't want kmods as we think out-of-tree kernel modules should not exist). (My personal opinion is that Free out-of-tree modules can be supported because they can be fixed if they're broken, proprietary ones are a wholely different issue though.) To bring it back to where we came in, we have a problem in that the KDE team are following one policy (update to the latest KDE release on the basis that it brings in new shiny goodness and fixes more stuff than it breaks) while the GNOME team are following the other (don't go to the latest point release in the interest of consistency). This doesn't make sense - if some parts of the distro are going with the adventurous policy, it renders the caution of other parts essentially null and void. The caution of the GNOME team doesn't really work, overall, if the kernel is following the adventurous policy. Conservative users still aren't going to go with Fedora. I think upgrading GNOME too should really be considered. But according to what our GNOME maintainers replied, it seems to be much more reliant on the very latest version of core system components than KDE is, so there appear to be good reasons for the current inconsistency. Kevin Kofler -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Christopher Aillon wrote: Sure, you can blame Gecko for having it's unstable ABI be, well, unstable. But blame also goes to the apps for not using the stable ABI. Why does Mozilla expect apps to use an ABI: * which didn't exist when the apps were written and * which they aren't even using for their own apps? Everyone complains about M$ using internal W32 APIs in IE, why does Mozilla do the same with internal xulrunner APIs? If you think everyone should use the stable ABI, why is Firefox not using it? Kevin Kofler -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Mark McLoughlin wrote: For fedora-virt folks, we have a virt-preview repository, the general idea being: - a repo where you can pull f11 builds of the latest rawhide virt bits - purely for people who want to help with testing f12 virt, but aren't willing to run rawhide - it's not about making new features available to f11 users, it's about allowing f11 users to get involved with f12 development - if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces - we'll do our best to fix problems specific to this repo, but in reality we care more about problems which affect stock f11 or rawhide/f12 - we're trying to keep the limit the packages in the repo to purely virt related packages - e.g. right now we need something from f12 selinux-policy, but I'm hoping we can get added in an f11 update rather than pulling in the f12 version and breaking non-virt stuff We have that too for KDE, it's called kde-redhat unstable. But it's not a replacement for stable, tested version upgrades. Kevin Kofler -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Kevin Koflerkevin.kof...@chello.at wrote: Christopher Aillon wrote: Sure, you can blame Gecko for having it's unstable ABI be, well, unstable. But blame also goes to the apps for not using the stable ABI. Why does Mozilla expect apps to use an ABI: * which didn't exist when the apps were written and * which they aren't even using for their own apps? Everyone complains about M$ using internal W32 APIs in IE, who does that? why does Mozilla do the same with internal xulrunner APIs? If you think everyone should use the stable ABI, why is Firefox not using it? I don't see whats wrong with providing a an ABI that you can/want to support (i.e no ABI breaks for minor updates) and one for your internal use (i.e you know when it breaks and therefore fix your own app). -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Adam Williamson awill...@redhat.com writes: To bring it back to where we came in, we have a problem in that the KDE team are following one policy (update to the latest KDE release on the basis that it brings in new shiny goodness and fixes more stuff than it breaks) while the GNOME team are following the other (don't go to the latest point release in the interest of consistency). This doesn't make sense The KDE packagers have decided that KDE is good enough at avoiding regressions that upgrading from 4.2 to 4.3 is reasonably safe. (Or alternatively, that KDE 4.2 was so bad that 4.3 could only be an improvement.) The Gnome packagers have the opposite views of Gnome. Those 2 views do not conflict, and even if the teams were using the exact same criteria, they could still come to those conclusions. You can only call it inconsistent if KDE and Gnome have exactly the same release policy and exactly the same history of bugs (or the absence of bugs). This is clearly not the case. /Benny -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Adam Williamson, Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:26:53 -0700: Well, I think it's really the same issue. The problem is one of expectation: we have two similar components, GNOME and KDE, in the same distribution, following different update polices - GNOME favours stable, KDE favours adventurous. This confounds expectation. Yes, my problem is potentially almost solved with the tools at our disposal and some little tweaks to interfaces, except for the problem raised by Jesse, see my reply to his post. :) Adam, I see where you are coming from, but aside from the unclear definition of the Fedora's target audience (which is IMHO clearly defined as developers needing bleeding-edge distro with huge engineering support; we just live in denial for not saying so clearly) you are getting into much deeper organizational problem ... how manages Fedora. Actually, it seems to me the answer is no-one really ... this is really a community of packagers held together by very rough consensus and necessity to support each other. As such there is no such thing as corporate brand and expected behavior ... if KDE folks decide they want to package their packages (and they are their packages, not of the folks in the RH Desktop team) as they do and have multiple upgrades even for N-1 distros, it is only their business -- they will have to hold all pieces together if it blows up in their face. If Gnome folks decide to be more conservative (or conserving effort for Gnome 3.* and bigger stability of Gnome before Fedora 12 aka RHEL 6 Alpha) it is their business and nobody could them anything. I am not sure about Mandriva, I have never had it installed ever (even though I got kindly LiveUSB disk at Guadec 2007 -- it was wonderful free 3GB USB drive before I lost it ;-)), but if it is smaller distro, it could be true it was smaller community with more centrally controlled strategy? Or in other words ... read “Nature of the firm” (Coase, 1937) and “The Problem of Social Cost” (Coase, 1960) ... to understand one way how to get grasp of this community. In the situation where opportunity cost of cooperation is quite low, transaction cost is perceived as quite high, and cost of leaving the community quite low, there is no way how to centralize management of the community. There are some communities where it is possible to achieve *slightly* higher degree of centralization (Ubuntu, and possibly Mandriva), but certainly it is not the case of Fedora which is probably quite close to the extreme of market-driven organization (to use Coase's terminology). Matěj -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 10:59:25PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 05:37 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote: Adam Williamson wrote: I probably couldn't do much justice to a comprehensive plan as I have insufficient knowledge of how the buildsystem works. I was acting at a higher level - just trying to point out that it's essentially doomed to try and please everyone with a single update repository, that's not an argument anyone can win. Either the 'we want stable updates' camp or the 'we want shiny new stuff' camp is going to be disappointed. The problem is that your solution doubles maintainer and rel-eng workload. I think we really don't have the resources for that. Please don't personalize things. It's not 'mine', and it's not really a solution. I'm simply pointing out that it's literally impossible to satisfy both possible update policies with a single unitary repository. You are under the impression that we have an update policy at all. We don't. So we have nothing to satisfy, which makes it very possible. We either have to make it clear which policy we use and which policy we don't, and hence which theoretical user base we are not targeting, or take on extra work and try to satisfy both. I am not declaring myself in Actually, we could do nothing and be just fine. Let the users decide if and when and what they want to update. josh -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 09:24 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote: We either have to make it clear which policy we use and which policy we don't, and hence which theoretical user base we are not targeting, or take on extra work and try to satisfy both. I am not declaring myself in Actually, we could do nothing and be just fine. Let the users decide if and when and what they want to update. Doing nothing is an implicit choice in favour of the adventurous option, with the disadvantage that we don't come out clearly and say it. It's rather hard to choose 'if and when and what' you want to update on a system that you only really talk to once a week that otherwise just sits there and does its job. For instance - a server, or a home theater box. I have both of these types of system. They're set to auto-update once a day, I don't spend my life logging into them by SSH, poring over the update list and deciding what to install. I can do this because the conservative update policy of the distribution they run gives me confidence that the updates won't break the things. I couldn't do that with Fedora, as there's no policy to give me the confidence that automatically updating such systems won't break them. As I've said, this isn't a _problem_ per se, but it means Fedora has a particular identity that we don't seem comfortable talking about - 'let's pretend not to make a choice' - for some reason. See what I mean? No choice is a choice. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 12:46 +, Matej Cepl wrote: Adam Williamson, Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:26:53 -0700: Well, I think it's really the same issue. The problem is one of expectation: we have two similar components, GNOME and KDE, in the same distribution, following different update polices - GNOME favours stable, KDE favours adventurous. This confounds expectation. Yes, my problem is potentially almost solved with the tools at our disposal and some little tweaks to interfaces, except for the problem raised by Jesse, see my reply to his post. :) Adam, I see where you are coming from, but aside from the unclear definition of the Fedora's target audience (which is IMHO clearly defined as developers needing bleeding-edge distro with huge engineering support; we just live in denial for not saying so clearly) you are getting into much deeper organizational problem ... how manages Fedora. Actually, it seems to me the answer is no-one really ... this is really a community of packagers held together by very rough consensus and necessity to support each other. Actually I agree with you, I'd just really like this to be more out in the open and generally agreed-upon, so we can make saner decisions in certain cases and not have to worry about things we shouldn't need to worry about in the first place. It seems like we're happy to be that kind of distro _in effect_, but not to just come out and say it :) Don't be ashamed, people! We can come out of the closet! We're not your sysadmin's distro! ;) I am not sure about Mandriva, I have never had it installed ever (even though I got kindly LiveUSB disk at Guadec 2007 -- it was wonderful free 3GB USB drive before I lost it ;-)), but if it is smaller distro, it could be true it was smaller community with more centrally controlled strategy? There is slightly more central control possible in MDV's structure, but really I think the difference is just that MDV started off with a traditional update policy, properly enforced (there's a gatekeeper at MDV; official updates go through the security team, maintainers can't push them directly). So at MDV the process was to add a /backports repository to satisfy the adventurous tendency (which, by the way, took me a year and half to get done...). Fedora is the other way around. Or in other words ... read “Nature of the firm” (Coase, 1937) and “The Problem of Social Cost” (Coase, 1960) ... to understand one way how to get grasp of this community. In the situation where opportunity cost of cooperation is quite low, transaction cost is perceived as quite high, and cost of leaving the community quite low, there is no way how to centralize management of the community. This is rather a simplification. There is a degree of central control over Fedora. If you wanted to be cynical you could say it was based in Raleigh, but I'd never do such a thing ;). Otherwise we wouldn't be able to have packaging policies, release freezes...or releases, really. But I agree with the thrust of your argument, yeah. Oh, and the only non-fiction I read is the newspaper :) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 09:43:03AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 09:24 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote: We either have to make it clear which policy we use and which policy we don't, and hence which theoretical user base we are not targeting, or take on extra work and try to satisfy both. I am not declaring myself in Actually, we could do nothing and be just fine. Let the users decide if and when and what they want to update. Doing nothing is an implicit choice in favour of the adventurous option, with the disadvantage that we don't come out clearly and say it. Um, ok. I disagree, but hey we'll just go in circles. It's rather hard to choose 'if and when and what' you want to update on a system that you only really talk to once a week that otherwise just sits there and does its job. For instance - a server, or a home theater box. I have both of these types of system. They're set to auto-update once a day, I don't spend my life logging into them by SSH, poring over Personally, I don't care about meeting the needs of someone that wants to set their machine to auto-update so they can have warm fuzzies about it. We don't guarantee anything, we don't have official support contracts for Fedora, and as of right now we don't have the maintainer/QA/rel-eng manpower to even come close to making it safe to auto-update 100% of the time. See what I mean? No choice is a choice. Sure. It's called 'sticking with the status quo'. Which isn't all or nothing as you seem to want to paint it. It's left in the hands of the maintainers. josh -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 10:20 +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote: For fedora-virt folks, we have a virt-preview repository, the general idea being: - a repo where you can pull f11 builds of the latest rawhide virt bits - purely for people who want to help with testing f12 virt, but aren't willing to run rawhide - it's not about making new features available to f11 users, it's about allowing f11 users to get involved with f12 development - if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces - we'll do our best to fix problems specific to this repo, but in reality we care more about problems which affect stock f11 or rawhide/f12 - we're trying to keep the limit the packages in the repo to purely virt related packages - e.g. right now we need something from f12 selinux-policy, but I'm hoping we can get added in an f11 update rather than pulling in the f12 version and breaking non-virt stuff It hasn't been around long, but it's working well and we're getting valuable testing from it. The only thing we're missing is that we can't add virt-preview packages to the buildroot. We're considering switching from koji to mock for the builds because of this. With a little automation, I think this model could work fairly well for the likes of GNOME. This is essentially what I wanted to create with KoPeRs. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating/KojiPersonalRepos -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 23:51 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: To bring it back to where we came in, we have a problem in that the KDE team are following one policy (update to the latest KDE release on the basis that it brings in new shiny goodness and fixes more stuff than it breaks) while the GNOME team are following the other (don't go to the latest point release in the interest of consistency). This doesn't make sense - if some parts of the distro are going with the adventurous policy, it renders the caution of other parts essentially null and void. The caution of the GNOME team doesn't really work, overall, if the kernel is following the adventurous policy. Conservative users still aren't going to go with Fedora. If you stop looking at Fedora the repo of packages as a whole, and start looking at our discrete offerings, such as the Desktop spin and the KDE spin, you can start to find consistency within each of those spins. In the Desktop spin, you're going to see more conservative updates, mostly focused on pure bugfix releases with some notable exceptions like the kernel, but even that is fairly conservative. In the KDE spin you'll find more aggressive updates. This does actually match the environments quite well. Gnome targets the conservative, the ease of use, the minimal knobs to twist, the get out of my way and just let me work, where as KDE is really more about fine tuning and tweaking and turning one of the 4000 knobs 8° to the left and being more eager to get latest and greatest stuff. Perhaps we're failing to define a update policy because we have wildly divergent audiences, and we should be allowing SIGs that cater to these audiences define the policy that best suites their respective constituents. Defining Fedora is so darned hard because it's different things to so many different people. Diving down a bit deeper and defining Fedora Desktop vs Fedora KDE gets a bit easier to do. -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 08/06/2009 09:43 AM, Adam Williamson wrote: On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 09:24 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote: We either have to make it clear which policy we use and which policy we don't, and hence which theoretical user base we are not targeting, or take on extra work and try to satisfy both. I am not declaring myself in Actually, we could do nothing and be just fine. Let the users decide if and when and what they want to update. Doing nothing is an implicit choice in favour of the adventurous option, with the disadvantage that we don't come out clearly and say it. It's rather hard to choose 'if and when and what' you want to update on a system that you only really talk to once a week that otherwise just sits there and does its job. For instance - a server, or a home theater box. I have both of these types of system. They're set to auto-update once a day, I don't spend my life logging into them by SSH, poring over the update list and deciding what to install. I can do this because the conservative update policy of the distribution they run gives me confidence that the updates won't break the things. I couldn't do that with Fedora, as there's no policy to give me the confidence that automatically updating such systems won't break them. As I've said, this isn't a _problem_ per se, but it means Fedora has a particular identity that we don't seem comfortable talking about - 'let's pretend not to make a choice' - for some reason. See what I mean? No choice is a choice. In writing my reply, I figured out where the disconnect is between what you're seeing and what I'm seeing. You're looking at this from the user's point of view. In that case, a hands off policy does make it more likely that the user will have an adventurous experience rather than a conservative experience even if one segment of the maintainer community (the desktop team) is doing its best to play a conservative role. I think we'd be happy to admit to the end users that that's the kind of distro we are and that CentOS/RHEL may be a better venue for the machines that they want to take a hands-off, everything works today and so everything will work tomorrow and the next day approach. We currently tell people to run CentOS or RHEL for the machines in that use case because of the 13 month EOL period anyway. The viewpoint that you also have to see, though, is the packager viewpoint. From within we don't all agree on whether we should have a conservative or an adventurous update policy. As the specifics of whether to update KDE and whether to update GNOME demonstrate, different sets of maintainers want the opposite strategies. Mandating that maintainers will either follow the conservative or the adventurous or follow both the conservative and the adventurous update path may satisfy the most users but leaves the maintainers disgruntled. Being clear that how we're messaging this to the users isn't affecting how the maintainers get to handle their individual packages in this case makes sense. I'm going to note, though, that this still doesn't address the original poster's question or thorsten's followup -- some areas of our distribution will still follow a conservative update policy as long as we give individual maintainers the leeway to use their best judgement. -Toshio signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Adam Williamson wrote: As I said, the particular code isn't the issue. We ship a kernel API. At present, we consider it fine to break that API in stable releases. This is not something that would be considered 'stable' in a traditional definition. The kernel's just an example, we do the same kind of non-stable updates all over the place. That's the issue I'm trying to talk about, not just the specific example I happened to mention. Please don't bog down in specifics. Well, the specifics are that packages both within Fedora and in third-party repositories which depend on the bumped API usually get rebuilt (and patched if needed) fairly quickly, normally before the update even goes stable. Of course that's only possible for software which can be patched, which is just another example of how binary-only software is broken by design. Kevin Kofler -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 10:27 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: Perhaps we're failing to define a update policy because we have wildly divergent audiences, and we should be allowing SIGs that cater to these audiences define the policy that best suites their respective constituents. Defining Fedora is so darned hard because it's different things to so many different people. Diving down a bit deeper and defining Fedora Desktop vs Fedora KDE gets a bit easier to do. I definitely see what you're saying, and yeah, perhaps an issue is that we don't have enough of a separate identity for the separate spins. We don't have Kedora and Gedora (or Dedora, if you like ;), we have Fedora...but still, there's enough updates pushed even in packages in the Desktop spin which wouldn't go through in a more conventionally defined update process (ask yourself if RHEL would ship 'em :). -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 11:31 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: I definitely see what you're saying, and yeah, perhaps an issue is that we don't have enough of a separate identity for the separate spins. We don't have Kedora and Gedora (or Dedora, if you like ;), we have Fedora...but still, there's enough updates pushed even in packages in the Desktop spin which wouldn't go through in a more conventionally defined update process (ask yourself if RHEL would ship 'em :). That's not a useful argument. There is a huge difference between what RHEL would ship, and a conservative bugfix update. RHEL typically requires a paying customer contacting support about an issue, escalation from there, 3 levels of ACK/NACK decisions, and finally gobs of QA on a package before it ever goes out. Vastly different than what we do in Fedora, even for conservative updates. -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 10:31 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: See what I mean? No choice is a choice. In writing my reply, I figured out where the disconnect is between what you're seeing and what I'm seeing. You're looking at this from the user's point of view. Yes, you could say I have a nasty habit of doing that. ;) Actually I try and look at things from many points of view, but the user's point of view is a rather important one. We're _all_ users, even those of us who are also maintainers. Each maintainer only maintains a little bit of the distro. With regard to all the other packages we don't maintain, we're users. Imagine two staff members in a store discussing an issue, then one turning to the other and saying ohhh, I get it. You're thinking about the CUSTOMER'S point of view! :D In that case, a hands off policy does make it more likely that the user will have an adventurous experience rather than a conservative experience even if one segment of the maintainer community (the desktop team) is doing its best to play a conservative role. I think we'd be happy to admit to the end users that that's the kind of distro we are and that CentOS/RHEL may be a better venue for the machines that they want to take a hands-off, everything works today and so everything will work tomorrow and the next day approach. We currently tell people to run CentOS or RHEL for the machines in that use case because of the 13 month EOL period anyway. Well, I'd be happy if we did that, yes. I guess the best thing would be to take some kind of proposal to the appropriate committee that we just write up a document, for the wiki or fedoraproject.org or wherever's appropriate, to make it clear that we don't have a conservative update policy, and that we don't expect users to be able to treat Fedora like a CentOS/RHEL/Debian stable/whatever-style operating system, from an update point of view. The viewpoint that you also have to see, though, is the packager viewpoint. From within we don't all agree on whether we should have a conservative or an adventurous update policy. As the specifics of whether to update KDE and whether to update GNOME demonstrate, different sets of maintainers want the opposite strategies. Mandating that maintainers will either follow the conservative or the adventurous or follow both the conservative and the adventurous update path may satisfy the most users but leaves the maintainers disgruntled. Yes, I agree, it wasn't my intent to suggest that. Even in the combined case, maintainers always have the choice to not bother to ship adventurous updates, and even if we specify that we don't guarantee conservative updates, maintainers who don't want to do adventurous updates aren't compelled to. I just want to be clear about how the big picture looks to users in each of these cases, and try for consistent messaging on whichever path we end up on, so users know what they can expect from Fedora. I'm going to note, though, that this still doesn't address the original poster's question or thorsten's followup -- some areas of our distribution will still follow a conservative update policy as long as we give individual maintainers the leeway to use their best judgement. Yes, you're right there. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 11:35 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: I definitely see what you're saying, and yeah, perhaps an issue is that we don't have enough of a separate identity for the separate spins. We don't have Kedora and Gedora (or Dedora, if you like ;), we have Fedora...but still, there's enough updates pushed even in packages in the Desktop spin which wouldn't go through in a more conventionally defined update process (ask yourself if RHEL would ship 'em :). That's not a useful argument. There is a huge difference between what RHEL would ship, and a conservative bugfix update. RHEL typically requires a paying customer contacting support about an issue, escalation from there, 3 levels of ACK/NACK decisions, and finally gobs of QA on a package before it ever goes out. Vastly different than what we do in Fedora, even for conservative updates. OK, bad example, but you know what I mean. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Adam Williamson, Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:38:43 -0700: Oh, and the only non-fiction I read is the newspaper :) Not only I was a lawyer, I was even in a PhD student in sociology/ criminology in my previous life. :) Matěj -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 11:39 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: But we're providing an operating system, not just a bunch of packages. What if some group's written their own kernel module for their own purposes, rolled it out to all their systems, and doesn't expect an official update to make them re-write it? Same question for KDE - someone writes a tool for their group based on some KDE libraries, doesn't expect an update to come along and do a major KDE version bump and break some interface the tool relied on...reducing the question to 'are all the packages we care about okay' is, again, excluding some use cases, i.e. defining an identity for Fedora. We're providing a bunch of packages, that certain groups use to make a variety of operating systems. If you want to develop a tool and expect that it'll keep working on any given release without aggressive changes underneath, pick the Fedora Desktop operating system. If you want to run with the latest and greatest regardless of change risk, try the Fedora KDE operating system. -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 11:39:16AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 20:00 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote: Adam Williamson wrote: As I said, the particular code isn't the issue. We ship a kernel API. At present, we consider it fine to break that API in stable releases. This is not something that would be considered 'stable' in a traditional definition. The kernel's just an example, we do the same kind of non-stable updates all over the place. That's the issue I'm trying to talk about, not just the specific example I happened to mention. Please don't bog down in specifics. Well, the specifics are that packages both within Fedora and in third-party repositories which depend on the bumped API usually get rebuilt (and patched if needed) fairly quickly, normally before the update even goes stable. Of course that's only possible for software which can be patched, which is just another example of how binary-only software is broken by design. But we're providing an operating system, not just a bunch of packages. What if some group's written their own kernel module for their own purposes, rolled it out to all their systems, and doesn't expect an official update to make them re-write it? Same question for KDE - If they don't expect that, they have no idea what Fedora is or how it works. We don't care about out of tree drivers. someone writes a tool for their group based on some KDE libraries, doesn't expect an update to come along and do a major KDE version bump and break some interface the tool relied on...reducing the question to 'are all the packages we care about okay' is, again, excluding some use cases, i.e. defining an identity for Fedora. You keep making strawman arguments that liken Fedora to something more akin to RHEL or Ubuntu LTS. We aren't either of those. josh -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 12:06 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: OK, bad example, but you know what I mean. Yes, I do, and I think there is room for a Fedora offering that is released frequently (every 6 months), supported for about a year, with conservative updates to the platform. That's nearly exactly what we have in Fedora Desktop. There is also room for a Fedora offering that is released frequently (every 6 months), supported for about a year, with aggressive updates to the latest and greatest for the platform. That's nearly exactly what we have in Fedora KDE. The real problem is going to be when somebody wants to make an offering that features GNOME but has aggressive updates to latest and greatest GNOME on every update stream, as that cannot coexist with the conservative Fedora Desktop. -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 12:26 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: We're providing a bunch of packages, that certain groups use to make a variety of operating systems. If you want to develop a tool and expect that it'll keep working on any given release without aggressive changes underneath, pick the Fedora Desktop operating system. Except that doesn't work, because we still change stuff out from under you on Desktop. See the kernel example. There's others. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Adam Williamson wrote: Same question for KDE - someone writes a tool for their group based on some KDE libraries, doesn't expect an update to come along and do a major KDE version bump and break some interface the tool relied on... KDE would generally consider it a bug if that happened (API compat broken by a non-major* update), unless it was an interface that already had a big BC/SC not guaranteed warning label. (* major = e.g. KDE3 - KDE4) There may be situations in which such a break would be done anyway, but there would have to be a strong argument why such change is so critical as to warrant a compatibility break. -- Matthew Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies. -- Thank you for reading all the way to this .sig. You may stop reading now. Really. It is safe to stop. There is no more content. Why are you still reading? -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 12:30 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 12:06 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: OK, bad example, but you know what I mean. Yes, I do, and I think there is room for a Fedora offering that is released frequently (every 6 months), supported for about a year, with conservative updates to the platform. That's nearly exactly what we have in Fedora Desktop. There is also room for a Fedora offering that is released frequently (every 6 months), supported for about a year, with aggressive updates to the latest and greatest for the platform. That's nearly exactly what we have in Fedora KDE. Its kinda funny how the GNOME side is ending up on the 'conservative' side here. We are pretty agressive in pushing new stuff into each release. But we believe it is better to do that _before_ the release, not after. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Great thread. On 08/06/2009 01:59 AM, Adam Williamson wrote: I'm simply pointing out that it's literally impossible to satisfy both possible update policies with a single unitary repository. There was some talk about additional tagging in RPM being available in Fedora 13, wasn't there? Perhaps if that could propagate through the build, repo, and yum tools there would be a way to solve for various branches. MythDora is a spin that's worth studying here. It provides a specific purpose, is pretty well-tuned to that purpose, and doesn't necessarily update for every Fedora release. One can imagine a 'Fedora Solid' spin that pays special attention to QA, maybe only plans on every-other release, sometimes back-porting release+1 things that make a huge win, maybe takes longer to compose than a regular Fedora release. There was some talk about extending updates to 18 months, which would make such a spin feasible. CentOS tends to be crufty, Fedora tends to be broken. Average users usually want to be somewhere in the middle. Having a user-focused SIG as an additional check on packagers' decisions to update packages could have quality benefits. I like the idea that Fedora is whatever there's a SIG for, not just for avoiding the question, but for the idea that Fedora is a process, not a product. -Bill -- Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 http://www.bfccomputing.com/Cell: 603.252.2606 Twitter, etc.: bill_mcgonigle Page: 603.442.1833 Email, IM, VOIP: b...@bfccomputing.com Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 19:07 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote: Its kinda funny how the GNOME side is ending up on the 'conservative' side here. We are pretty agressive in pushing new stuff into each release. But we believe it is better to do that _before_ the release, not after. Right, aggressive between Fedora releases, conservative within a Fedora release. I kind of wish everybody did that, and actually treated our stable releases as, you know, stable releases, otherwise what's the point of even making releases, and going through freezes and feature processes and... -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 17:47 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote: Yea well, I dunno about you guys who run rawhide. But as an F-11 user, I am *very* glad I use KDE and the KDE SIG is giving me the latest and greatest to use. I am so glad I don't have to wait for F-12 to be released just to run the latest version of my desktop. Thank you once again KDE SIG for your awesome support and maintainership, it is second to none. So you want rawhide-like treatment for some of your packages, but not all of them? Where is the line? -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 15:53 -0500, Matthew Woehlke wrote: Adam Williamson wrote: Same question for KDE - someone writes a tool for their group based on some KDE libraries, doesn't expect an update to come along and do a major KDE version bump and break some interface the tool relied on... KDE would generally consider it a bug if that happened (API compat broken by a non-major* update), unless it was an interface that already had a big BC/SC not guaranteed warning label. (* major = e.g. KDE3 - KDE4) There may be situations in which such a break would be done anyway, but there would have to be a strong argument why such change is so critical as to warrant a compatibility break. It seems to happen rather a lot for that to be the case, though maybe the situation I'm most familiar with (KDE 4.0 - 4.1 - 4.2) is an unusual situation. I was watching KDE quite closely in MDV at that point, as quite a lot of features that people expected from 3.x were missing, and I remember, for instance, that someone was trying to get kmilo (for multimedia keys) working on 4.x, they had to port it to 4.0, then port it to 4.1, then to 4.2... as I said, I suppose this could just be because 4.0 didn't quite have everything settled down yet so some major changes still had to be made for 4.1 / 4.2. I'm not enough of an expert on KDE to be sure. But we're getting bogged down in specifics again :) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 12:30 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 12:06 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: OK, bad example, but you know what I mean. Yes, I do, and I think there is room for a Fedora offering that is released frequently (every 6 months), supported for about a year, with conservative updates to the platform. That's nearly exactly what we have in Fedora Desktop. There is also room for a Fedora offering that is released frequently (every 6 months), supported for about a year, with aggressive updates to the latest and greatest for the platform. That's nearly exactly what we have in Fedora KDE. The real problem is going to be when somebody wants to make an offering that features GNOME but has aggressive updates to latest and greatest GNOME on every update stream, as that cannot coexist with the conservative Fedora Desktop. The other problem is if you'd like stable updates but you prefer KDE, or vice versa =) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 19:56 -0400, Bill McGonigle wrote: Great thread. Glad someone appreciates it :) On 08/06/2009 01:59 AM, Adam Williamson wrote: I'm simply pointing out that it's literally impossible to satisfy both possible update policies with a single unitary repository. There was some talk about additional tagging in RPM being available in Fedora 13, wasn't there? Perhaps if that could propagate through the build, repo, and yum tools there would be a way to solve for various branches. We discussed that a few branches of the thread back ;). The principal problem with that is that it's tricky to have multiple 'tracks' within one update repository - so if a package does get an 'adventurous' update then hits a security bug, there's no way to have a separate update without the adventurous change but with the security bug fixed. You then don't have the ability to choose the 'stable but secure' path - you're stuck with either the release package (stable but insecure) or the updated package that includes the adventurous change (secure but potentially unstable). MythDora is a spin that's worth studying here. It provides a specific purpose, is pretty well-tuned to that purpose, and doesn't necessarily update for every Fedora release. One can imagine a 'Fedora Solid' spin that pays special attention to QA, maybe only plans on every-other release, sometimes back-porting release+1 things that make a huge win, maybe takes longer to compose than a regular Fedora release. There was some talk about extending updates to 18 months, which would make such a spin feasible. I'm not sure you could _make_ a 'Solid' spin unless there was a Solid update path to work off. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 7:10 PM, Jesse Keatingjkeat...@redhat.com wrote: snip Right, aggressive between Fedora releases, conservative within a Fedora release. I kind of wish everybody did that, and actually treated our stable releases as, you know, stable releases, otherwise what's the point of even making releases, and going through freezes and feature processes and... snip We could always just go the direction of Arch Linux, have a rolling release and just push out new install images every 6 months (or so). :) . only kidding, but it does seem like some of the arguing points are going that direction. -Adam -- http://maxamillion.googlepages.com - () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Hi all. KDE 4.3 will come to F11 and F10. It's a cool thing. There aren't updates like this for Gnome. Why not? F10 with Gnome 2.26 sounds fine to me. -- Josephine Fine Tannhäuser 2.6.29.6-213.fc11.i586 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
2009/8/5 Josephine Tannhäuser josephine.tannhau...@googlemail.com: KDE 4.3 will come to F11 and F10. It's a cool thing. There aren't updates like this for Gnome. Why not? F10 with Gnome 2.26 sounds fine to me. Because I don't want to _support_ the latest and greatest GNOME on old versions. A lot of the GNOME stack would require updating core system stuff like gtk+ and glib2, and when you've done that you might as well be running F11. I don't mind merging small patches from upstream to fix specific bugs, but new code brings new bugs, and that's not something a typical F10 user wants to cope with. In my opinion, if you want newer functionality, you should just upgrade to F11. Richard. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Josephine Tannhäuserjosephine.tannhau...@googlemail.com wrote: Hi all. KDE 4.3 will come to F11 and F10. It's a cool thing. There aren't updates like this for Gnome. Why not? F10 with Gnome 2.26 sounds fine to me. Because a lot of GNOME works directly with (and depends on) the core OS., and we want a stable system. And really because we should rather invest effort in making sure that upgrades between major releases for the core OS and default desktop packages are nearly bulletproof, and in addition try to maintain a parallel-installable stable set of library packages for a set period of time. This would make it so that things outside the core are less likely to break due to core upgrades. I'm thinking concretely here of say a package like clutter which has switched 0.6 - 0.8 - 1.0 in the same clutter package is a bad idea once the core desktop depends on it, we'll need to parallel install. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 05.08.2009 12:02, Richard Hughes wrote: 2009/8/5 Josephine Tannhäuser josephine.tannhau...@googlemail.com: KDE 4.3 will come to F11 and F10. It's a cool thing. There aren't updates like this for Gnome. Why not? F10 with Gnome 2.26 sounds fine to me. Because I don't want to _support_ the latest and greatest GNOME on old versions. A lot of the GNOME stack would require updating core system stuff like gtk+ and glib2, and when you've done that you might as well be running F11. I don't mind merging small patches from upstream to fix specific bugs, but new code brings new bugs, and that's not something a typical F10 user wants to cope with. In my opinion, if you want newer functionality, you should just upgrade to F11. I don't want to get between the lines here (there are good arguments and against updating Gnome and KDE for older releases) and I hate buzz-words like Corporate identity, but I find it more and more odd that one doesn't know what to expect from Fedora, because similar sized things (KDE and Gnome) are handled quite differently. Further: The behavior changes to much IMHO -- one reason why I use Fedora at home and work and suggested it to others were the major new kernel versions that got delivered as regular update. But that doesn't really work anymore since half a year or something: F-10 is still on 2.6.27, 2.6.29 sits in Updates-testing for ages; 2.6.30 is out for weeks, but no sign of a update for F-11 apart for a few commits in CVS. :-( A more common look and feel to the outside world and a more reliable update scheme IMHO would be good for Fedora, as people would know what to expect. Ohh, and it would prevent discussions like this ;-) CU knurd -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wednesday 05 August 2009 13:08:28 Colin Walters wrote: Because a lot of GNOME works directly with (and depends on) the core OS., and we want a stable system. Does this mean, that every time I've installed my system and left GNOME out, I made a broken system? Is there a list of those 'direct dependencies' somewhere? Tuju -- Better to have one, and not need it, than to need one and not have it. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 12:23:12PM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote: On 05.08.2009 12:02, Richard Hughes wrote: 2009/8/5 Josephine Tannhäuser josephine.tannhau...@googlemail.com: KDE 4.3 will come to F11 and F10. It's a cool thing. There aren't updates like this for Gnome. Why not? F10 with Gnome 2.26 sounds fine to me. Because I don't want to _support_ the latest and greatest GNOME on old versions. A lot of the GNOME stack would require updating core system stuff like gtk+ and glib2, and when you've done that you might as well be running F11. I don't mind merging small patches from upstream to fix specific bugs, but new code brings new bugs, and that's not something a typical F10 user wants to cope with. In my opinion, if you want newer functionality, you should just upgrade to F11. I don't want to get between the lines here (there are good arguments and against updating Gnome and KDE for older releases) and I hate buzz-words like Corporate identity, but I find it more and more odd that one doesn't know what to expect from Fedora, because similar sized things (KDE and Gnome) are handled quite differently. Short of passing a policy that says no major desktop upgrades for stable releases, I don't see this changing. If we did pass that, I have a feeling it would piss off a lot of people. Passing the converse (always upgrade) would piss off just as many. I'm not that enthralled with starting a who do you want to piss off today? campaign for Fedora. Further: The behavior changes to much IMHO -- one reason why I use Fedora at home and work and suggested it to others were the major new kernel versions that got delivered as regular update. But that doesn't really work anymore since half a year or something: F-10 is still on 2.6.27, 2.6.29 sits in Updates-testing for ages; 2.6.30 is out for weeks, but no sign of a update for F-11 apart for a few commits in CVS. :-( I haven't followed it that closely days. However, being on the bleeding edge kernel isn't what it used to be. Yes, 2.6.30 has been out for a while. But I believe we currently wait until at least the .1 release (which was still out a while ago). Right now, .4 was just released on Jul 30. Having a bit of patience to see if the kernel is a lemon or not is pretty prudent IMHO. A more common look and feel to the outside world and a more reliable update scheme IMHO would be good for Fedora, as people would know what to expect. Ohh, and it would prevent discussions like this ;-) Some of us tried that. We got critcized for it pretty heavily. josh -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 11:49 +0200, Josephine Tannhäuser wrote: Hi all. KDE 4.3 will come to F11 and F10. It's a cool thing. There aren't updates like this for Gnome. Why not? F10 with Gnome 2.26 sounds fine to me. GNOME has stable bugfix updates, and we do bring all of those into released Fedoras. Backporting entirely new desktop versions to old Fedora releases is a bad idea for a number of reasons: - It would pull along a good-sized portion of the 'plumbing' layer: new udev, kernel, pulseaudio, X... - We don't have the man power to do a good job on this. This may be different on the KDE side. While we do a good chunk of the development work for each GNOME release, the KDE sig is more of a packaging effort, as far as I understand. Correct me if I'm wrong here... - It is not compatible with the concept of a finished, stable release. If we just want to dump all the latest stuff in there, why bother with freezes and releases at all ? We could all just use rawhide... Matthias -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
Josephine Tannhäuser wrote: KDE 4.3 will come to F11 and F10. It's a cool thing. There aren't updates like this for Gnome. Why not? For the most part, those are hard decisions best left to the discretion of the maintainers in question. -- Rex -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Thorsten Leemhuisfed...@leemhuis.info wrote: Further: The behavior changes to much IMHO -- one reason why I use Fedora at home and work and suggested it to others were the major new kernel versions that got delivered as regular update. But that doesn't really work anymore since half a year or something: F-10 is still on 2.6.27, 2.6.29 sits in Updates-testing for ages; 2.6.30 is out for weeks, but no sign of a update for F-11 apart for a few commits in CVS. :-( If I got this correctly the main reason are the out of tree drm patches (modestetting) needs to be ported, just rebasing to newer upstream bits does not always work because it would require updated X drivers. So it ended up like the old xen days (delays due to back/forwardporting effort). -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 08:01 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote: I don't want to get between the lines here (there are good arguments and against updating Gnome and KDE for older releases) and I hate buzz-words like Corporate identity, but I find it more and more odd that one doesn't know what to expect from Fedora, because similar sized things (KDE and Gnome) are handled quite differently. Short of passing a policy that says no major desktop upgrades for stable releases, I don't see this changing. If we did pass that, I have a feeling it would piss off a lot of people. Passing the converse (always upgrade) would piss off just as many. I'm not that enthralled with starting a who do you want to piss off today? campaign for Fedora. We've had this discussion before, but to re-state my opinion: the only sane way to handle this is multiple, discretionary update repositories. A repository for security and stable bugfix updates, and a repository for other updates - major version bumps whose purpose isn't solely to fix a security issue or, with minimal changes, a clearly identified bug. It's more work, but it's the only workable consistent system that doesn't restrict some maintainer from being able to do what they want to do. A distribution with much fewer resources than Fedora (Mandriva) has been using this system successfully, to the satisfaction of developers and users, for several releases now. The system gives users the flexibility to choose whether they want a 'traditional' stable update system, or a more adventurous, version-upgrading system. And maintainers can choose whether or not they want to take on the work of shipping updates in the adventurous repository. In all cases, users and maintainers both know what each repository is for, and what they'll be getting depending on which they choose to use. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 1:47 PM, Adam Williamsonawill...@redhat.com wrote: snip We've had this discussion before, but to re-state my opinion: the only sane way to handle this is multiple, discretionary update repositories. A repository for security and stable bugfix updates, and a repository for other updates - major version bumps whose purpose isn't solely to fix a security issue or, with minimal changes, a clearly identified bug. It's more work, but it's the only workable consistent system that doesn't restrict some maintainer from being able to do what they want to do. A distribution with much fewer resources than Fedora (Mandriva) has been using this system successfully, to the satisfaction of developers and users, for several releases now. The system gives users the flexibility to choose whether they want a 'traditional' stable update system, or a more adventurous, version-upgrading system. And maintainers can choose whether or not they want to take on the work of shipping updates in the adventurous repository. In all cases, users and maintainers both know what each repository is for, and what they'll be getting depending on which they choose to use. snip +1 Would definitely be one way to solve this sort of problem. -Adam -- http://maxamillion.googlepages.com - () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Adam Millermaxamill...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 1:47 PM, Adam Williamsonawill...@redhat.com wrote: snip We've had this discussion before, but to re-state my opinion: the only sane way to handle this is multiple, discretionary update repositories. A repository for security and stable bugfix updates, and a repository for other updates - major version bumps whose purpose isn't solely to fix a security issue or, with minimal changes, a clearly identified bug. It's more work, but it's the only workable consistent system that doesn't restrict some maintainer from being able to do what they want to do. A distribution with much fewer resources than Fedora (Mandriva) has been using this system successfully, to the satisfaction of developers and users, for several releases now. The system gives users the flexibility to choose whether they want a 'traditional' stable update system, or a more adventurous, version-upgrading system. And maintainers can choose whether or not they want to take on the work of shipping updates in the adventurous repository. In all cases, users and maintainers both know what each repository is for, and what they'll be getting depending on which they choose to use. snip +1 Would definitely be one way to solve this sort of problem. -Adam -- http://maxamillion.googlepages.com - () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list +1 OpenSUSE buildservice does this and it is nice to be able to pull things like latest OpenOffice, etc. -- Mark Bidewell http://www.linkedin.com/in/markbidewell -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 17:21 +0300, Juha Tuomala wrote: On Wednesday 05 August 2009 14:06:43 Jussi Lehtola wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 13:46 +0300, Juha Tuomala wrote: On Wednesday 05 August 2009 13:08:28 Colin Walters wrote: Because a lot of GNOME works directly with (and depends on) the core OS., and we want a stable system. Does this mean, that every time I've installed my system and left GNOME out, I made a broken system? Is there a list of those 'direct dependencies' somewhere? No, it means that updating gnome would mean updating a bunch of libraries that are used by other apps. Which sounds like, it would break 'other apps', not 'the core OS'. What's being talked about, specifically, is libraries like GTK+ (especially GTK+ itself). That's part of the 'core system' by any reasonable definition, as many many applications depend on it (including, say, our default browser, and all our system configuration tools). There are several other components down in the stack that GNOME depends on which are in the same situation. Things aren't quite the same on the KDE side, as relatively few really mission-critical apps in Fedora are built on Qt and the rest of the KDE stack. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Mark Bidewellmark.bidew...@alumni.clemson.edu wrote: snip +1 snip Would we want to consider putting together a proposal for something that is OpenSuSE Buildservice styled in order to satisfy this? -Adam -- http://maxamillion.googlepages.com - () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 08/05/2009 11:47 AM, Adam Williamson wrote: And maintainers can choose whether or not they want to take on the work of shipping updates in the adventurous repository. How does this work? It would seem that the adventurous repository would be mandatory as something that changes ABI would require other packages to be rebuilt. Also, having the expectation that the other repository is for security updates doesn't address the problem of a security release breaking ABI. -Toshio signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 13:58 -0500, Adam Miller wrote: On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Mark Bidewellmark.bidew...@alumni.clemson.edu wrote: snip +1 snip Would we want to consider putting together a proposal for something that is OpenSuSE Buildservice styled in order to satisfy this? It doesn't really need that (though it'd not be a bad thing to have, necessarily; actually, I believe there's an ongoing project to open up our current build system to public use through a PPA-style system). It's more just a question of introducing extra repositories to be used (from both the user and maintainer side) through the existing build system. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 11:58 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: On 08/05/2009 11:47 AM, Adam Williamson wrote: And maintainers can choose whether or not they want to take on the work of shipping updates in the adventurous repository. How does this work? It would seem that the adventurous repository would be mandatory as something that changes ABI would require other packages to be rebuilt. In the Mandriva system, ABI-breaking updates in /backports are discouraged by policy. When it happens, obviously you have to provide updates for all dependencies in /backports, too. Neither of the examples in question really breaks many public ABIs, though, AFAIK. GTK+ version bumps don't break the ABI, we don't rebuild seven thousand packages each time GTK+ gets updated (it's still on the 2.0 ABI). Most KDE / GNOME breakage with new releases is 'internal', I think - so if you're updating all of KDE/GNOME anyway, the API/ABI breakage isn't a problem. Also, having the expectation that the other repository is for security updates doesn't address the problem of a security release breaking ABI. That's rather unlikely (well, except in oddball cases like Firefox / XULRunner), but sure it does - if a security update cannot be done in any way other than by breaking API/ABI, you ship rebuilds of all dependent packages as official updates in the stable update repository. That's how we'd handle it at present anyway. The normal policy is you do the minimum possible amount of changes to address vital problems, but you do _have_ to fix them, even if the 'minimum possible amount of changes' involves rebuilding a dozen packages. This is how all conventionally updated distros work, AFAIK (including for e.g. RHEL - they wouldn't just leave a security hole unpatched because they had to break an API/ABI to fix it ...) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 15:28 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote: Care to write up a proposal on how this work-flow would look like? Without some of the details, I'm confused how one would avoid all kinds of weirdness from repo conflicts if you have multiple of these repos enabled. That, and the fact that everything is built from a single buildroot at the moment. I probably couldn't do much justice to a comprehensive plan as I have insufficient knowledge of how the buildsystem works. I was acting at a higher level - just trying to point out that it's essentially doomed to try and please everyone with a single update repository, that's not an argument anyone can win. Either the 'we want stable updates' camp or the 'we want shiny new stuff' camp is going to be disappointed. I'm not sure what kind of weirdness you mean, but I have to emphasize this isn't some kind of theoretical system, it really exists in the really real world :). I have three Mandriva machines (not worth the bother converting them to Fedora), some using /backports and /updates repositories, some just /updates, and there's no 'weirdness' involved. Probably the major issue I can think of is that maintainers pushing /backports packages should be careful to forward port changes done on the /updates branch to /backports, so that those using the more adventurous updates don't miss out on any security / bug fixes done in the stabler updates. But since the person doing /backports packages and the person doing /updates packages are usually exactly the same person, this doesn't present much of a problem. Oh, I just realized, in case it's not clear - in the MDV system, the adventurous repo (/backports) is complementary to the stable repo (/updates), it doesn't replace it. You either use /updates and /backports, or just /updates; using /backports but not /updates is not intended or supported. Yes, there would have to be some kind of accommodation in the build bots for this. Packages intended for the adventurous updates branch would have to be built in an environment which used that repository *and* the stable updates repository as a source, and packages intended for the stable updates branch would have to be built in an environment which only used the stable repository as a source. It's more work, yes, as I said in my initial mail :) The missing bit of the argument from before is whether we actually want to care about people who only want 'stable' updates, and that tracks back to the question of what Fedora actually is, which I don't believe the Board has settled yet. If we don't care about providing a stable update set, then implementing this system would be unnecessary work, and it's fine to continue simply to have a single repo and allow adventurous updates to be sent there. Of course, packages sent to /backports can break sometimes, but that's not unexpected, and no different to shipping updates of the same level of potential brokenness in a single update repository, as we currently do. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 08/05/2009 12:11 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 11:58 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: Also, having the expectation that the other repository is for security updates doesn't address the problem of a security release breaking ABI. That's rather unlikely (well, except in oddball cases like Firefox / XULRunner), heh, the exact case I was thinking of :-) but sure it does - if a security update cannot be done in any way other than by breaking API/ABI, you ship rebuilds of all dependent packages as official updates in the stable update repository. That's how we'd handle it at present anyway. The normal policy is you do the minimum possible amount of changes to address vital problems, but you do _have_ to fix them, even if the 'minimum possible amount of changes' involves rebuilding a dozen packages. This is how all conventionally updated distros work, AFAIK (including for e.g. RHEL - they wouldn't just leave a security hole unpatched because they had to break an API/ABI to fix it ...) Sure, this is comparable to the present situation. But it doesn't seem like it makes things much better. * It doesn't solve the original poster's issue (that the GNOME stack isn't going to be updated for F10 since the maintainers don't want to do this and the policy wouldn't require it) * It doesn't solve the follow-on issue of things being different between major Fedora components (since gnome maintainers don't want to participate but kde maintainers do) * It makes things more complex (for instance, we would have to build packages against multiple repository sets -- ie: [F12-release + F12-updates-security] [F12-release + F12-updates-security + F12-updates-adventurous] since there could be incompatibilities between the packages in updates-security and updates-adventurous.). * It makes more work for rel-eng to prepare and push the extra repos. -Toshio signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 08/05/2009 03:41 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: The missing bit of the argument from before is whether we actually want to care about people who only want 'stable' updates, and that tracks back to the question of what Fedora actually is, which I don't believe the Board has settled yet. If we don't care about providing a stable update set, then implementing this system would be unnecessary work, and it's fine to continue simply to have a single repo and allow adventurous updates to be sent there. See, this is different. If you're waiting for the board to define what Fedora actually is, you're going to die waiting. I'm of the opinion that such a question is too broad and vague. Now, if you wanted to know how the board feels about providing a stable updates set, and you can elaborate on what that means and how it works, with less handwaving and miracles, I think we could give a more productive and useful answer. * ~spot, Fedora Board member, speaking for himself only * Although, strictly speaking, that sort of thing is in FESCo's domain. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 12:44 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: Sure, this is comparable to the present situation. But it doesn't seem like it makes things much better. * It doesn't solve the original poster's issue (that the GNOME stack isn't going to be updated for F10 since the maintainers don't want to do this and the policy wouldn't require it) * It doesn't solve the follow-on issue of things being different between major Fedora components (since gnome maintainers don't want to participate but kde maintainers do) * It makes things more complex (for instance, we would have to build packages against multiple repository sets -- ie: [F12-release + F12-updates-security] [F12-release + F12-updates-security + F12-updates-adventurous] since there could be incompatibilities between the packages in updates-security and updates-adventurous.). * It makes more work for rel-eng to prepare and push the extra repos. It also would require multiple CVS branches, one for security, one for adventurous, as well as different buildroots to go along with those, since you wouldn't be able to build a security update for a gnome package against the newer adventurous gtk and expect it to work on the older GTK, likewise if you had to modify a gnome package to work with newer gtk, you dont' want those modifications in the way if/when you need to do a conservative security update for it later. All this really does is create a pseudo rawhide for each release, blurring the lines even more around why we even do releases. With a 6 month cycle, do we really want to take on all this extra headaches and hassles just so that you can have some newer experimental software a bit sooner, or without doing a wholesale update to the next release? -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 12:58 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: It also would require multiple CVS branches, one for security, one for adventurous, as well as different buildroots to go along with those, since you wouldn't be able to build a security update for a gnome package against the newer adventurous gtk and expect it to work on the older GTK, likewise if you had to modify a gnome package to work with newer gtk, you dont' want those modifications in the way if/when you need to do a conservative security update for it later. Oh I forgot, you also need -testing versions of each of those repos, so for any release, you could have updates, updates-testing, experimental, and experimental-testing repo options and build targets and buildroot shuffling going on. WHAT FUN! -- Jesse Keating RHCE (http://jkeating.livejournal.com) Fedora Project (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating) GPG Public Key (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub) identi.ca (http://identi.ca/jkeating) signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 12:44 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: Sure, this is comparable to the present situation. But it doesn't seem like it makes things much better. * It doesn't solve the original poster's issue (that the GNOME stack isn't going to be updated for F10 since the maintainers don't want to do this and the policy wouldn't require it) * It doesn't solve the follow-on issue of things being different between major Fedora components (since gnome maintainers don't want to participate but kde maintainers do) * It makes things more complex (for instance, we would have to build packages against multiple repository sets -- ie: [F12-release + F12-updates-security] [F12-release + F12-updates-security + F12-updates-adventurous] since there could be incompatibilities between the packages in updates-security and updates-adventurous.). * It makes more work for rel-eng to prepare and push the extra repos. The major thing it solves is it makes it possible to reliably get only 'conventional' updates. At present, as traditional security / bugfix updates are mixed up with more adventurous updates, you can't do this. An alternative would be to tag updates within a single repo in a way that yum and PackageKit understand and have appropriate configuration options to enable certain types of update, which would really be much the same situation, just organized slightly differently. Either way it's going to be some level of extra work for someone somewhere, I haven't denied that. Was just discussing the parameters of addressing (or not addressing) this issue. It's not possible to make all parties happy in the current framework, so either we change something, or we take a specific decision to make some parties unhappy, and justify that formally. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 13:04 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: An alternative would be to tag updates within a single repo in a way that yum and PackageKit understand and have appropriate configuration options to enable certain types of update, which would really be much the same situation, just organized slightly differently. bodhi and packagekit already work together to mark updates as bug-fix, security or enhancement. Do you need anything else ? Of course, with this setup, once you decide to not be adventurous and install the enhancement update to KDE 4.3.0, you won't get bug fixes for the older version you are stuck on, and more seriously, no security updates either... -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 15:49 -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote: On 08/05/2009 03:41 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: The missing bit of the argument from before is whether we actually want to care about people who only want 'stable' updates, and that tracks back to the question of what Fedora actually is, which I don't believe the Board has settled yet. If we don't care about providing a stable update set, then implementing this system would be unnecessary work, and it's fine to continue simply to have a single repo and allow adventurous updates to be sent there. See, this is different. If you're waiting for the board to define what Fedora actually is, you're going to die waiting. I'm of the opinion that such a question is too broad and vague. Now, if you wanted to know how the board feels about providing a stable updates set, and you can elaborate on what that means and how it works, with less handwaving and miracles, I think we could give a more productive and useful answer. * I think they're the same question. I've explained why before, but here we go again. The question is whether Fedora intends to be a distribution suitable for day-to-day general purpose use by people who are not necessarily that interested in Fedora per se - whether it's got an aim to be a general-purpose operating system like other distributions do - or not. That's the only framework in which you can sensibly answer whether we want a stable update set or not, to my mind. If we are - or _want to be_ - that kind of a distribution, we have to provide a stable update set so we can stop telling people who just want a distro to run Aunt Flo's desktop or their webserver or whatever on to run CentOS or Ubuntu instead. If, however, we really don't care about that kind of usage scenario and instead we want to focus only on being a kind of project for the prototyping of systems that will eventually _become_ components of that kind of generally usable operating system - which to my mind is more or less the status at the moment - it doesn't make any sense to provide a stable update set, it's not serving any real purpose, and it'd just be a waste of effort. I really can't see any more 'specialized' framework in which to address the question. Whether it makes sense to provide a solely stable update set or not is inevitably tied to who would use such a set, and that in turn inevitably ties back to exactly what kind of Fedora user we want, and that in turn is inextricably linked to the identity of Fedora as a project. If you can break that chain at any point, please do, otherwise I'm struggling to divorce the issues :) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 08/05/2009 04:11 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: The question is whether Fedora intends to be a distribution suitable for day-to-day general purpose use by people who are not necessarily that interested in Fedora per se - whether it's got an aim to be a general-purpose operating system like other distributions do - or not. That's the only framework in which you can sensibly answer whether we want a stable update set or not, to my mind. What does a stable update set mean? Does it mean updates which don't break ABI/API? Does it mean backporting patches and not permitting new versions as updates? I seriously doubt that anyone is pushing updates simply to push them in the current Fedora model. Maintainers are pushing updates because they feel there is a reason, a bug fixed, a security hole closed, a significant feature enhancement that users want (or that they think users want). Without a finer definition here, it's all just hand-waving. ~spot -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 08/05/2009 01:04 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 12:44 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: Sure, this is comparable to the present situation. But it doesn't seem like it makes things much better. * It doesn't solve the original poster's issue (that the GNOME stack isn't going to be updated for F10 since the maintainers don't want to do this and the policy wouldn't require it) * It doesn't solve the follow-on issue of things being different between major Fedora components (since gnome maintainers don't want to participate but kde maintainers do) * It makes things more complex (for instance, we would have to build packages against multiple repository sets -- ie: [F12-release + F12-updates-security] [F12-release + F12-updates-security + F12-updates-adventurous] since there could be incompatibilities between the packages in updates-security and updates-adventurous.). * It makes more work for rel-eng to prepare and push the extra repos. The major thing it solves is it makes it possible to reliably get only 'conventional' updates. At present, as traditional security / bugfix updates are mixed up with more adventurous updates, you can't do this. An alternative would be to tag updates within a single repo in a way that yum and PackageKit understand and have appropriate configuration options to enable certain types of update, which would really be much the same situation, just organized slightly differently. For this: $ repoquery -qi yum-plugin-security Name: yum-plugin-security Version : 1.1.22 Release : 1.fc11 Architecture: noarch Size: 23792 Packager: Fedora Project Group : System Environment/Base URL : http://yum.baseurl.org/download/yum-utils/ Repository : updates Summary : Yum plugin to enable security filters Description : This plugin adds the options --security, --cve, --bz and --advisory flags to yum and the list-security and info-security commands. The options make it possible to limit list/upgrade of packages to specific security relevant ones. The commands give you the security information. Either way it's going to be some level of extra work for someone somewhere, I haven't denied that. Was just discussing the parameters of addressing (or not addressing) this issue. It's not possible to make all parties happy in the current framework, so either we change something, or we take a specific decision to make some parties unhappy, and justify that formally. Sure. I'm just pointing out that you're trying to solve a different problem than either the original poster or Thorsten. (And now that I understand your problem better, perhaps yours is already solved :-) -Toshio signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 16:18 -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote: Maintainers are pushing updates because they feel there is a reason, a bug fixed, a security hole closed, a significant feature enhancement that users want (or that they think users want). A bug filed by FEVEr or it's replacement saying there is a bigger number released somewhere. -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
* Jesse Keating [05/08/2009 22:38] : A bug filed by FEVEr or it's replacement saying there is a bigger number released somewhere. Do maintainers really push out updates for this? I've always considered a reason to push out a build for rawhide but not to issue updates for the stable releases. Emmanuel -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, August 5, 2009 2:33 pm, Jesse Keating wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 16:18 -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote: Maintainers are pushing updates because they feel there is a reason, a bug fixed, a security hole closed, a significant feature enhancement that users want (or that they think users want). A bug filed by FEVEr or it's replacement saying there is a bigger number released somewhere. FEVER reports against rawhide, it doesn't by itself suggest an update. Sometimes I only update rawhide, sometime I also update the current release if it seems appropriate. It's a useful tool when you have a couple dozen packages or more. -- Orion Poplawski Technical Manager 303-415-9701 x222 NWRA/CoRA DivisionFAX: 303-415-9702 3380 Mitchell Lane or...@cora.nwra.com Boulder, CO 80301 http://www.cora.nwra.com -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 22:49 +0200, Emmanuel Seyman wrote: Do maintainers really push out updates for this? I've always considered a reason to push out a build for rawhide but not to issue updates for the stable releases. It's really hard to tell when so many updates pushers put 0 information in their updates about /why/ they are pushing the update. -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 13:14 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 13:04 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: An alternative would be to tag updates within a single repo in a way that yum and PackageKit understand and have appropriate configuration options to enable certain types of update, which would really be much the same situation, just organized slightly differently. We already tag updates as either security, bugfix, or enhancement. yum-security would only install the security ones. However what was yesterday's security update can become today's enhancement update, so you'd have to consume the enhancement in order to get the security fix. Likewise tomorrow's security fix may be built against yesterday's enhancement for something else, so in order to get the security for A you have to get the enhancement for B. That was the problem I initially thought of with this method, but then I thought - there's no actual reason we can't have different trains of updates in a single repository, is there? We could have: foo-1.0-2 (conservative bug fix, tagged as such) foo-2.0-1 (adventurous version upgrade, tagged as such) within one updates repository, couldn't we? Is there anything that unavoidably says we can't? -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 13:25 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: Either way it's going to be some level of extra work for someone somewhere, I haven't denied that. Was just discussing the parameters of addressing (or not addressing) this issue. It's not possible to make all parties happy in the current framework, so either we change something, or we take a specific decision to make some parties unhappy, and justify that formally. Sure. I'm just pointing out that you're trying to solve a different problem than either the original poster or Thorsten. (And now that I understand your problem better, perhaps yours is already solved :-) Well, I think it's really the same issue. The problem is one of expectation: we have two similar components, GNOME and KDE, in the same distribution, following different update polices - GNOME favours stable, KDE favours adventurous. This confounds expectation. Yes, my problem is potentially almost solved with the tools at our disposal and some little tweaks to interfaces, except for the problem raised by Jesse, see my reply to his post. :) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 13:03 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 12:58 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: It also would require multiple CVS branches, one for security, one for adventurous, as well as different buildroots to go along with those, since you wouldn't be able to build a security update for a gnome package against the newer adventurous gtk and expect it to work on the older GTK, likewise if you had to modify a gnome package to work with newer gtk, you dont' want those modifications in the way if/when you need to do a conservative security update for it later. Oh I forgot, you also need -testing versions of each of those repos, so for any release, you could have updates, updates-testing, experimental, and experimental-testing repo options and build targets and buildroot shuffling going on. WHAT FUN! Mandriva has a /testing repository for /updates, but not for /backports, on the basis that /backports is fundamentally unstable so you may as well just do your testing in the repo. This works fine, so far. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 14:26 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: Well, I think it's really the same issue. The problem is one of expectation: we have two similar components, GNOME and KDE, in the same distribution, following different update polices - GNOME favours stable, KDE favours adventurous. This confounds expectation. I don't know that this is really the case. KDE is rolling up a bugfix release. Gnome does bugfix releases. Other than a difference in how they number them, is there really that big of a difference in what they are doing? -- Jesse Keating Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature! identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Tom spot Callawaytcall...@redhat.com wrote: On 08/05/2009 04:11 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: The question is whether Fedora intends to be a distribution suitable for day-to-day general purpose use by people who are not necessarily that interested in Fedora per se - whether it's got an aim to be a general-purpose operating system like other distributions do - or not. That's the only framework in which you can sensibly answer whether we want a stable update set or not, to my mind. What does a stable update set mean? Does it mean updates which don't break ABI/API? Does it mean backporting patches and not permitting new versions as updates? I seriously doubt that anyone is pushing updates simply to push them in the current Fedora model. Maintainers are pushing updates because they feel there is a reason, a bug fixed, a security hole closed, a significant feature enhancement that users want (or that they think users want). Without a finer definition here, it's all just hand-waving. The whole thing is useless, maintainers should decide whether the risk of pushing foo-x.y.z is worth the gain or not. Threads like this are IMHO useless why can't you update bar, foo has been updated to foo+1 ... well each maintainer has a reason why he does a update or not, while asking for the reasons is not wrong demanding a policy (bureaucracy) on when to update what an for which reasons will as Josh already said just piss people off. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 14:36 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 14:26 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: Well, I think it's really the same issue. The problem is one of expectation: we have two similar components, GNOME and KDE, in the same distribution, following different update polices - GNOME favours stable, KDE favours adventurous. This confounds expectation. I don't know that this is really the case. KDE is rolling up a bugfix release. Gnome does bugfix releases. Other than a difference in how they number them, is there really that big of a difference in what they are doing? It's not a bugfix release, it's a bit ingenuous to describe it as one. KDE make major changes between 4.x and 4.y. The bugfix releases are one level down. 4.2.1 vs. 4.2 is a bugfix release, but 4.3 vs. 4.2.1 is not. It's exactly the same as the GNOME situation - 2.24.1 vs. 2.24.0 is a bugfix update, 2.26.0 vs. 2.24.1 is not. Most distributions would not bump KDE from 4.2 to 4.3 in their stable update repositories. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 14:34 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 14:24 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: That was the problem I initially thought of with this method, but then I thought - there's no actual reason we can't have different trains of updates in a single repository, is there? We could have: foo-1.0-2 (conservative bug fix, tagged as such) foo-2.0-1 (adventurous version upgrade, tagged as such) within one updates repository, couldn't we? Is there anything that unavoidably says we can't? How do you choose which to build against? How do you close deps? Hmm, yeah. Which again leaves us with separate repositories as the solution. Unless the buildsystem can be tied in to the package tags, somehow. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 4:59 PM, Adam Williamsonawill...@redhat.com wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 14:36 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 14:26 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: Well, I think it's really the same issue. The problem is one of expectation: we have two similar components, GNOME and KDE, in the same distribution, following different update polices - GNOME favours stable, KDE favours adventurous. This confounds expectation. I don't know that this is really the case. KDE is rolling up a bugfix release. Gnome does bugfix releases. Other than a difference in how they number them, is there really that big of a difference in what they are doing? It's not a bugfix release, it's a bit ingenuous to describe it as one. Except for the fact that it fixes *over 10,000 bugs*. [1] And I believe the word you are looking for is *dis*ingenuous. It's hard to believe KDE 4.2 had that many bugs... [1] http://kde.org/announcements/4.3/index.php -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Re: KDE vs. GNOME on F10
On 08/05/2009 02:26 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 13:25 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: Sure. I'm just pointing out that you're trying to solve a different problem than either the original poster or Thorsten. (And now that I understand your problem better, perhaps yours is already solved :-) Well, I think it's really the same issue. The problem is one of expectation: we have two similar components, GNOME and KDE, in the same distribution, following different update polices - GNOME favours stable, KDE favours adventurous. This confounds expectation. This isn't solved by having two repositories. We'd still have a post on this list asking for the new GNOME release to be built for F-10 and we'd still have the GNOME maintainers say that they're not going to do that. Yes, my problem is potentially almost solved with the tools at our disposal and some little tweaks to interfaces, except for the problem raised by Jesse, see my reply to his post. :) Heh. I thought you were willing to accept that change when you talked about using tags rather than a separate repo :-) -Toshio signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
