[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[Les Mikesell]

David Woodhouse 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.

Give me a break... Nvidia, VMware, Sun Java, java apps, and on and on. 
If something _has_ to be included as a Fedora package to work from one 
release to the next, Fedora has failed for me.

>>  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.

How is having to modify and recompile every package every few months 
'coping' with change?  It is fairly rare to ever have to replace a 
binary on a windows or mac due to an OS update.  The mac even maintains 
backwards compatibility across an update to a different CPU and wildly 
different OS - and includes tools to migrate your settings and apps. 
Without the stability factor that enterprise and long-term distributions 
contribute, free software wouldn't be replacing anything.

> 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).

What should that mean to the user of the third party products that don't 
'work properly' with fedora?  Why would anyone need to 'work properly' 
as opposed to following standard interfaces to interoperate correctly?

>>  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.

What does mean in terms of being able to install vendor drivers, VMware, 
Sun's Java with integration into the system path scheme, or something 
from a random 3rd party repo?

> 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.

That is completely unrealistic, given a Fedora policy that excludes 
things from the repository for various reasons, and just wrong to 
require the system to be self-contained on general principles.

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

Its only crap if you believe that a distribution should require every 
piece of software that it will run to 'work properly' with the 
distribution provider according to the distribution provider's 
definition.  I don't - I believe interfaces are what makes software work.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com