[SPAM] Re: Plan for tomorrows (20070531) FESCO meeting

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 12:33:22AM -0400, J French wrote:
> >  
> * Some ridiculous dependencies still exist. For instance, just because I 
> want a Gnome desktop does not mean that I even have the capabilities to 
> burn CDs and/or DVDs, so why have packages for that? I also happen to 
> hate Evolution with a passion (I use Thunderbird), but Gnome is somehow 
> still dependent upon this as well (last I checked) so I have to keep it 
> around. There are others.

Dependency bloat is something that is, in my opinion, improving in
fedora, but we are coming from very far away. Moreover there has to be a
balance between usability and less dependencies. If you spot precise
cases with dependencies that are wrong, I think the best is to fill a
bug, and if the maintainer is unresponsive or unwilling post here. There
is no specific rule currently, regarding package split, it is left to
the packager best judgement.

> * You can't seriously be considering actually releasing Fedora 7 on 
> schedule! Are you trying to be like Microsoft? I had to roll back 2 
> systems here because X crashes upon closing tabs in Firefox and upon 
> switching VTs. I looked at the bug for the Firefox one and it's listed 
> as "medium severity". Come on now, medium? I was anything but mediumly 

The severity in bugzilla doesn't always really reflect the real
severity.

> angry when I lost all of the web sites I had open, a few text documents 
> in gedit. And yes, I do save often, but that's beside the point. 
> Further, the Nautilus issues with random crashes and an inability to 
> delete files mounted on NFS drives are rediculous. These are all issues 
> that NEED to be fixed or your reputation is going to go down the 
> crapper. I don't care how "pretty" you make the desktop, if it doesn't 
> work for more than 15 minutes at a time, it isn't worth squat to me. 
> I've filed or participated on bugs for all of these issues.

The issue of nautilus being broken seems to be well known (to judge on
the frequent threads on this list) but it may be that this issue is more
an issue for upstream than something specific of fedora itself.
 
> * What ever happened to following the LFS standards as I remember seeing 
> as long ago as FC3? The main one here being a move of default 
> documentroot and databases to /srv where they belong? Yes, I understand 
> people will be unfamiliar with it at first, but there's been quite a bit 
> of discussion regarding ways to handle this. This isn't really something 
> enough to stop a rollout, but it has been "under advisement" for years 
> now. As it is, if I want to , for instance, put my MySQL databases under 
> /srv where they belong, I have to go through all sorts of BS.

That seems a bit strange to me. There are guidelines about that and the
LFS should be followed. There has been good progress on that way (in my
opinion) with fedora core adopting fedora extras guidelines and trying
to follow them. I think that these issues are packaging bugs.

> That's all I've got right now. I think Fedora 8 should be all about 
> cleaning up the packages and stabilizing the OS.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, Fedora is not about stabilizing the OS.
Fedora, by design is bleeding edge and moving. It doesn't mean that it
should be full of bugs, but the rapid pace of development leads to
having more bugs than in a distro where stability is a goal. That being
said there has been a lot of change in the infrastructure and processes
with the merge of core and extras in F7 and it has certainly used a lot
of time and energy from the contributors. Hopefully F8 will be more
about fixing packages, and I hope that the merge review and the
participation of community in F8 will improve Fedora.

--
Pat