[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 08:57 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> >> So you'll ship any sort of breakage with no regard to the
> >> interfaces you promoted last month?
> > 
> > Of course not. We take care to ensure that when interfaces change, 
> > every Fedora package is updated to cope.
> 
> Leaving everything all 3rd party work that tries to cooperate and a 
> user's own previous work useless. 

I've never found that to be the case, no. Any third party work that
"tried to co-operate" would be packaged as a Fedora package, and would
be included in my above statement.

And even my own personal hacks -- if it's a project of any significance
at all, then it's probably worth packaging. As much as I like to think
I'm unique (and I know others like to tell themselves that too), I'm
not. So if there's any piece of software which is _so_ useful to me that
I actually get off my lazy arse and _write_ it, then it's a fairly safe
bet it's going to be useful to someone else too.

>  If a commercial system did that, they'd be out of business in a
> heartbeat. 

The ability to cope with change is _precisely_ what distinguishes free
software from the commercial systems that it is slowly, but surely,
replacing.

The only people who really have a problem with it are those who fail to
work properly with whatever they call their 'upstream' project(s).

>  A free distribution doesn't have the same reasons to care about
> cooperation, but from the user's perspective its all the same - if you
> can't count on interfaces being maintained, a platform simply isn't
> worth the effort.

There is a difference between internal and external APIs. Basic stuff
like GTK and glibc _don't_ break in incompatible ways very often. Those
are the kinds of things that external software uses.

If you're involved in the horrid details of the latest PackageKit API
change, then you really have no business being an _external_ piece of
software anyway. Whatever it is, it should be packaged and included in
the Fedora repository, and then we'll be able to take care of it when we
break it.

To be honest, Les, I think you're just spouting crap again. It's an
unfortunate habit with you, isn't it?

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse at intel.com                              Intel Corporation