End of life for FC1?

[George Garvey]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 05:31:11PM -1000, Warren Togami wrote:
> >Considering all of the problems that FC 2 has been having, I wonder if 
> >Redhat would consider changing the published schedule so that a version of 
> 
> This is an untrue and unfair statement.  The truth of the matter is FC2 
> ON THE AVERAGE is far more stable and greatly improved over FC1.  There 

   Perhaps true there, but not true here. Almost every system I've
installed FC2 on has been a source of problems so far. I believe that
"almost" means 6 out of 7 have problems. One of my personal favorites is
ext3 journal errors on about 4 out of 7 systems.
   Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make sense out of the symptoms
enough to even say what is wrong so it can be filed in bugzilla and
possibly fixed.
   I'm really not complaining: as far as I'm concerned, this is my problem
to deal with. If I can get to the point where I can make a meaningful bug
report, I will.
   I'm just saying that for some people, apparently, FC2 has been a near
disaster. Claiming that it isn't true, because it isn't true for everyone,
or anyone you know, won't change the fact. It looks like the some of the
people who are having problems are having huge problems, from reading this
list.
   I do personally believe that the development process, which was to
include user testing, didn't work very well. I know I tried to be a part of
it, and failed. I only realized that one of the problems that was in the
release had started in test 2 or test 3 (can't remember which), but the
symptoms weren't clear enough to me to say that it was software rather than
hardware until way too late. I only realized it was software when it
started failing the same way on multiple computers for a particular
configuration (LVM on top of RAID1) during the release installation.
   ncurses isn't even working right. That was certainly noted early in
development. It was said that the problem was in users of ncurses, as I
understood it. That's nice. But I still can't use a bunch of keys on the
keyboard any more in Mutt, because I haven't had time to fix it myself.
   I hope someone is evaluating the process that is being used to produce
Fedora. It looks like it needs some changes before it can be considered
workable. That is one of the frustrations, though: the "community" does not
seem to be very involved in that evaluation, if it is happening. In fact,
"we" don't even know if it is happening or not.
   I didn't know when I installed FC1 that the switch to an early version of
Linux 2.6 was going to happen. Linux has a history of servious problems
with a newly released kernel. This one seems to be better than some of the
previous ones, but it looks like it has some problems that make it hard for
some configurations, as usual. to use. If anyone had asked me what I
thought (I know, big deal), I would have recommended against it, Linus
personally requesting it or not.
   Making all this stuff work together is hard. I installed FC1 because I
was tired of doing it myself. Up until then, all our systems were entirely
home brew, without a distribution, based on my personal efforts. I ran out
of time for this "hobby," and finally admitted it was just that: a hobby I
didn't have time for any more. I don't want to complain or yell. I just
hope that someone is taking the time to look at the process and make sure
it is working, based on feedback.
   I get a very strong impression that a lot of the people involved are
saying it is working, and not paying a lot of attention to feedback that
there is some part of it is that is not working. This impression may be
entirely wrong. But it does bring up how well the "community" is being
communicated with, since I'm not the only one with this impression.
   By the way: taking the statement "if it's not in bugzilla it doesn't
exist" too far is ridiculous. I can understand it meaning that complaining
that it isn't getting attention because it wasn't put into an automated
system is stupid.
   But it is just as stupid to actually believe that it doesn't therefore
exist.
   Some users of our software often don't tell us about bugs. When we find
out, we don't tell them the bug doesn't exist. We just ask them to tell us
about it next time, and not just "grin and bear it." We don't want them to
grin and bear it. We want to fix it. I assume the attitude is the same
around here. But it is hard to tell that from that very self-righteous
statement. I do understand that the duties of a user of not paid for
software is different from software that is purchased with money.
   Our experience with users is that they really aren't very good at
providing descriptions of what happened when they found a bug. I've
certainly found that difficult with some of the problems I've had with FC2.
   I hope this is useful. Perhaps not.