Fedora too cutting edge?

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 09.01.2008 19:45, Hans de Goede wrote:
> One of the few reasons why Fedora is my distro of choice is because its usually 
> cutting edge, and I like to be where the development is happening.

+1

> However today I've had an encounter with Fedora which make me wonder if 
> sometimes we aren't a little too cutting edge.

See below. But actually I think we here and there are not even cutting
edge enough; we for example left users on Firefox2 for FC6 for about 7
months until we shipped F7 -- that looked totally odd for a distribution
that is curring edge in most other areas.

Another example: hplip is still on 2.7.7 for F8 right now while upstream
is at 2.7.12 in between and supports 22 new printers (
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/release_notes.html ). We don't provide any
solutions for users that buy those printers right now besides using
rawhide. Thus they have to wait/ask for a proper update or wait until F9
or -- the latter means waiting about 6 months for driver. That's IMHO
unacceptable -- especially as printer manufacturers release successor
models quite often (it feels to me like a new successor model get
released in each printer class about once a year, but I didn't check).

> I tried to get an industrial 
> firewire camera to work with the stock Fedora kernel using the juju stack. Long 
> [...]
> story short, it didn't work.
>
> Does this mean that Fedora should not have shipped the new stack? No it 
> doesn't! Getting code out there early into many hands for testing is a good thing.

+1

> What IMHO we should have done is build both the new and the oldstack, which is 
> possible on the kernel side, and modify our patches to userspace to support the 
> juju stack, so that the userspace libs can work with either one. On top of this 
> we should then have written a small gui utility for easy switching.

That's what I call "Fedora knows better then you". It's afaics not the
first time Fedora forces users to use a new technology instead of giving
them a choice for a small period. For example there are still users that
would like to use the ntfs-module from the kernel, but we don't enable
it (making ntfs-3g the default and eabling ntfs in the kernel should
solve this problem). Another example: Xgl never made it into the Fedora
repos (which in parts is due to packaging problems, but it looks a bit
odd). Another example: Zope/Plone was excluded in F7 and later because
we jumped to python 2.5 but didn't want to ship a compat-python package
(this + Zope/Plone are now in livna for F7 and soon F8 and devel).

> Another example of Fedora being to cutting edge is pulseaudio, [...]

Not sure about pulseaudio -- works well for me afaics. But yeah, might
be a similar issue.

Linux is about choice.

Just my 2 cent.

Cu
knurd