Leaving?

[Dave Jones]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 06:58:47PM -0400, Sean wrote:

 > > I'm sensing a lack of leadership here.
 > 
 > Yes, many people are just complaining about binary-driver support and not
 > standing up to lead the task of actually providing that support.
 
Note, that any level of binary compatibility is an absolute nightmare
to maintain over time.  Red Hat does this to some extent for RHEL
releases, and it's a ton of work. The number of times we've not been
able to just take a fix from an upstream diff and apply because it would
have broken an ABI is $BIGNUM.  In some cases, it's taken _weeks_ to
get an equivalent fix that does the same thing whilst maintaining ABI
constraints.  Typically these reworked fixes jump through all kinds of
horrific hoops to pull off the end result, but they require massive amounts
of QA to ensure that they're doing the right thing.

Fedora has the advantage that we *can* take an upstream fix that
everyone else is already using, and benefit from the fact that it's
seeing wide exposure outside of Fedora, as well as within.

In simple terms: If you want stable ABIs and you're using Fedora,
you're using the wrong distro.

		Dave

-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk