regressions (was: Re: Linux is not about choice [was Re: Fedora too cutting edge?])

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Thu Jan 10 06:03:05 UTC 2008


On 10.01.2008 05:59, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Thorsten Leemhuis (fedora at leemhuis.info) said: 
>>> Right now DRI/DRM breaks VT switch and suspend on my laptop. Should we
>>> ship two Intel drivers and two kernels until this is resolved? [...]
>> Bugs in a updated package are something totally different (everyone
>> tries to avoid them, but they happen, so we have to live with them) then
>> switching to a new completely firewire stack that doesn't support
>> everything yet what the old stack did.
> By this logic, we should have enabled both old IDE and libata and
> let the users choose between them at runtime as well.

Not sure about this one -- Alan afaics did a lot of work to make sure
everything crucial worked with the new libata PATA driver on those
systems I used. Sure, there were bugs, but there are bug in every
software and Alan tried its best to fix them quickly.

But yeah, maybe enabling both old IDE and libata (with defaulting to
libata) for one release might have made sense. At least it made for
OpenSuse, as that's what they did afaik. Sure, it's more work for one
release, but if that is needed to support all systems that were
supported earlier then it might be worth the trouble.

> The way to have a reliable core system is to pick a single supported
> interface and fix it.

Totally agreed in general. But sometimes it's not easily possible when
switching from foo to bar (be it the old firewire stack and juju or IDE
and libata).

> As far as I can tell, the firewire stack now
> works, except for an issue with one hardware chipset.

Now: seems so afaics. But when it was new it was a regression for quite
a bunch of people. That's bad and we should avoid regressions as much as
possible. Just like the kernel developers do -- Torvalds on lkml yells
loudly if there is a regression. He sometimes even reverts patches that
made the situation better for a lot of people if it is a regression for
a quite small group of existing users. I think we need similar rules, as
people will otherwise turn away from Fedora to something that just works
for them; otherwise everyone will continue to say "Fedora is a Beta for
RHEL" is we don#t take our userbase serious.

CU
knurd




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