"What is the Fedora Project?"

[Seth Vidal]

On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Máirín Duffy wrote:

> On 10/15/2009 10:40 AM, Seth Vidal wrote:
>> And this is the crux of our problem:
>> 
>> fedora is for latest leading-edge pkgs. It's not easy or reasonable to
>> have the latest of things AND have a stable interface for them.
>> 
>> So if latest software is fedora's raison d'etre then it sure seems like
>> fedora is just not for you.
>> 
>> how else do we set reasonable expectations?
>
> Apparently we were able to achieve both the latest and stability several 
> releases ago, though?

Not really.

I have a few explanations for this:

0. I suspect there is a fair bit of nostalgic memory going on here. Things 
get better the more in the past you put them in your memory. It's an 
evolutionary advantage to not remember suffering as well. :)

1. at f6 things were still 'core and extras' and core meant @redhat.com 
people only which, implicitly, meant things went slower. That's not a 
positive statement. Look back at the complaints at that time. Look at the 
folks yelling that fedora was not bleeding edge it was not living up to 
its promise and stated goals.

2. f6 might have been a better than average release simply b/c of 
stablization work going into it for rhel5 - which was brought forth from 
f6. Also rhel5 coming out of f6 might be yet another reason for slower 
rev'ing of things in f6 b/c the internal folks were too busy to keep up a 
fast rev.

3. If you have a finite set of people who have to keep track of 100 things 
and you have the same number of people who have to keep track of 500 
things I think you'll find that the people who have to keep track of the 
100 things will do a better job. The size of the distro has grown 
significantly, the number of active contributors who are keeping things in 
shape has not grown that much.

Do me a favor - think of the set of people you remember from f6 who were 
keeping things together and think of the set of people today.

Now, how much larger is that group today than 3yrs ago? I suspect the 
answer is "not that much bigger".

-sv