[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 09:30:57AM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> 
> Yeah, that sucks. We should do better than that.
> 
> Although I've always been a little dubious about our 'Feature Process',
> it does seem that it addresses this kind of problem. For the feature to
> reach 100% completion, it should obviously involve fixes for the other
> display managers. And there is a 'reversion plan' in case we don't
> manage to complete the feature in time for the release. 

Here, simply keeping up using pam_console would have worked. But lead to
much less testing of fast user switching. The whole story can be tracked
down from this bug, from 2007-02-09:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=228110

Later a pam module was added for login. And even later a solution has
been found for dm, building on what was done for xinit, that plays 
well with wdm/xdm/slim, though it is still not applied:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=452156

>From my point of view, this comment (certainly biased, it is a comment
from me) summary the situation, and it is really a fedora issue,
not only an upstream issue:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=452156#c15

> From what you say above, it sounds like the ConsoleKit feature should be
> declared incomplete, and we should be reverting it unless the feature
> owners finish the job.

If this is the case, then we would only have had ConsoleKit in F-11...

At the time the issue happened, there was no feature process, but I
can't see how it would have changed anything. A feature process cannot
prevent lack of planning, focus on gnome, lack of integration with
existing frameworks and lack of consideration for alternative setups, if
this attitude is endorsed by the project on a whole, which is the case
for fedora, see for example
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=228110#c19
and look at all the conversations on this mailing list or fesco
decisions.

A FESCo vote (at least of today FESCo) would certainly be to let the
minor dm be broken (hopefully they will be fixed for the RHEL release),
so even if a Feature was not considered finished I doubt the changes
would have been reversed. Once again, I don't think that such an
attitude is fundamentaly problematic, this allowed to have much more
testing for gdm, kdm and fast user switching, which is good. But this is
also, in my opinion, a good example of what fedora really is, and my
personnal point of view is that it is becoming even more so.

As a side note I thought that having more packages, and packages that
are not mainstream, with the corresponding packagers being part of the
community would lead to a push to another direction, but for
good or bad, this didn't happened -- and I think that in the fedora
community, those, like me, not in complete agreement with the 
'mainstream' fedora (more testing than planning, innovation breaking 
old frameworks, focus on major desktop components) are, in my opinion,
getting less and less consideration. The corresponding packages are 
simply broken intermitently, always on the struggle to catch up with 
the constant changes.

--
Pat