What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 3:31 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If I tell you that "it works" is that enough for you?
>
> If you have identical hardware, an identical set of other packages, and a
> similar workload, yes.

How do you know if I do or do not?  Are you saying that the only
information that would help you make a determination as to 'known
broken' or 'is working' as YOU define those concepts is if you have
feedback from people who are doing what you are doing with the
hardware you are using? How much detail do you need about other
people's machines and workloads? How in the hell do you expect to
capture that level of detail from other people?

You keep missing the point. I'm going to have to ratchet up the
bluntness factor for you.

You are trying to rely on other people's experiences with updates to
justify whether you should be installing the update on your systems.
You haven't described how you would expect to capture that distributed
information from other people in such a way that you can make use of
it before you need to make the decision as to whether or not to
install that update on your very very precious machines.

You are talking in generalities and what this discussion needs at this
point is implementation specifics.

> It's not a matter of trust for at least couple of reasons.  One is that your
> hardware and installed package set is probably nothing like mine.

How do you know? How do you know that anyone out there is doing
something close enough to what you are doing to be comparable?  If you
are looking to compare systems and workloads you have to trust people
they are reporting the right information.

> Again, it isn't personal - it has to do with the need to keep certain
> machines running.

Stop with the generalities. Talk about YOUR needs and YOUR workloads.

> And what needs to happen is to know that somewhere,
> someone has installed the same package set on the same kind of hardware and
> has it still working.

How do you expect that information to be collected? How do you expect
that information to be served up?

>> I've used it.
>
> That hardly sounds like a recommendation.

I official recommend that you do whatever it is I've already
suggested.  Does that help?
Does that make the idea sound better to you? Need that in writing?


> That sounds like at least an admission that the stock tools and mechanisms
> aren't good enough.

Good enough for what? I do not expect the provided tools to meet all
of my needs all the time. As an adminstrator I am accountable for the
integrity of my systems... not Fedora... not the mirrors which are
serving fedora packages..and not my ISP who is providing me the
network access to reach those mirrors.  I expect there to be a need
for local administration policy that I control...which mitigates the
dependence on any external entity which puts the integrity of my
systems at risk.  For updates, that means doing several things, one of
which is caching backups locally in case I need to back out
something..even in situations where my ISP has a problem and my
network access goes down.

-jef