Goodbye, Fedora

[Josef Whiter]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 01:25:01PM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org>:
> > We only have your analysis of the problem. Not a description of the 
> > actual problem. That would be more helpful. Perhaps a bug report.
> 
> You have half of it.  rpm should be statically linked to avoid this sort
> of cul-de-sac.  It's not like multople instances of it running are
> going to be a frequent occurrence.
> 

Then why did you not propose this till now?  If this is something that is such a
big issue for you, why not bring it up until this rather noisy uneeded exit?  If
you had before hand then I apologize and please show me where I can read what
happened, but if not, isn't the wonderful thing about open source building a
better produce through collaboration? 

> I can tell you the library in question was libcom_err, and I think I
> deleted it when removing e2fsprogs-libs to get around a file conflict.
> But with rpm not working I couldn't reinstall the library.  Boot failed,
> ssh/sshd failed -- I had to kluge with netcat and tar just to back up
> my files.  It was horrible.  
> 
> Alas, I no longer have the logs, as I lost them during installation.
> I don't recall what the file was, but the conflict was completely
> avoidable and would never have occurred if the repo and RPMs had been
> in a sane state.
>  

What repo?  What was the conflict?  Did you file a bugzilla before you went
hacking away?  If there is a problem it needs to be tracked and fixed.  Again, I
thought this was how Open Source software was supposed to work.

> > >* Chronic governance problems.
> > 
> > More details required. I have a special interest in this.
> 
> I was thinking of the the endless internal wrangling over what to do
> about the core/extras split, and the years the project has spent
> failing to engage with third-party developers and repo maintainers.
> That IRC-session parody of Fedora politics somebody wrote back around
> 2002 remains as painfully on-point today as it was then.
> 

AFAIK core/extras is no longer split, I'm not sure my head has been in the sand
for the last 4 or 5 months.  What 3rd party developers and repo maintainers
specifically are you talking about?  Have you offered up a solution to this
so-called problem?

> The Fedora project has never resolved the tension between Red Hat's
> business need for it to be an adjunct of RHEL development and its core
> group's stated aim to be community-facing.  The result is a sociology
> that has increasingly combined the least useful features of a corporate
> project with the least useful snakepit-like features of 'community'
> politics -- as perfectly illustrated by the list response to my goodbye
> note.
> 

Welcome to human nature.  This community is not what the problem is, it is
simple human nature to take your angry tirade marking all of the things we "do
wrong" without any suggestions of what to do right and to lash out against it,
as its a personal offense to everybody who has worked on this project in order
to make it better.  This is a wonderful and helpful community, and if you write
things as you do to be offensive to those humans in the community, then expect
some/many of them to react as any other human would, with anger.

> > >* Allowing RPM development to drift and stagnate -- then adding
> > >  another layer of complexity, bugs, and wretched performance with yum. 
> > 
> > RPM indeed drifted but I dont think it actually stagnated. Anyway 
> > http://rpm.org for more details. RPM doesnt do automatic dependency 
> > resolving. Yum does. I did read somewhere your claim that introducing 
> > yum was a big change that put Fedora in a position of advantage or some 
> > such thing.
> 
> Yes, I thought so at the time.   But yum failed to live up to what I thought
> was considerable early promise.  It remained painfully slow and buggy.
> Improvements in dependency resolution that seemed conceptually obvious
> to me were never made.
> 

Then fix it.  If the problems are so obvious to you why did you not submit
patches?  Yum works fine for me, so I'm not going to try and fix it, but if its
not working for you, where are the bugzillas detailing the problems you have,
and the patches to fix them?  I know you are a capable programmer, if these
things are so obvious and so much of a pain, why did you not fix them yourself
and submit them upstream?  Isn't that the open source way?

> The most obvious of these would have been a clique analysis of mass
> updates to fail the smallest possible subset hanging on a missing
> dependency, rather than failing the entire update.  I used to be a
> mathematician, I have the graph-theory chops to do something about
> this, and I tried to contribute some refactoring patches that would
> have led in this direction.  They were rejected, and I had other
> things to do.
> 

Ok so instead of working with the developers in order to get these things
resolved, you just dropped them to do other things.  So who's fault is this
again?  It works fine for me, and apparently other people as well, we aren't
just going to read your mind or pick up after your work, if you feel that
something needs to be changed then why not try your hardest until some sort of
solution is gained?

All I see through this little tirade of yours is that you have no
interest in actually fixing problems, just complaining about them, and then not
even complaining about them in a manner which gets them fixed, just in
inflammatory ways in order to get attention.  As I said before, the way things
are done now work fine for me, so I'm not going to change them, and this goes
for every individual, if it does what they need it to, they aren't going to
change it.  So if it doesn't do what you need it to do, change it, or make sure
somebody knows it doesn't do what you need it to and try to work towards a
solution.

Josef