new daylight savings time
Benjamin Franz
snowhare at nihongo.org
Sat Feb 24 20:35:12 UTC 2007
On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
> New, untested things have to appear first somewhere. What do you think would
> be more effective?
I kind of like the vibrancy of the Ubuntu community: People have new ideas
and they spinoff 'Edubuntu', 'Nubuntu', 'Ubuntu CE', 'Kubuntu', 'Xubuntu',
and so on. Good ideas spread and come back. Classic 'Bazaar' to Fedora's
'Cathedral'. You don't see a lot of 'spinoff' from Fedora because Redhat
has clutched it too close to themselves. If you have a strong enough base
community and loose enough control, experimentation happens automatically.
> Ubuntu sounds good, but keep in mind that they don't have much actual
> experience or a track record in either long term support or rolling out
> updates painlessly across versions with big changes.
Granted. And I expect some major bobbles in their future. One or two won't
kill them, a steady stream of problems would.
> Does the number of fedora users that aren't going to report bugs matters to
> anyone?
Emphatically: Yes!
Developers and testers are *part* of an eco-system which is ultimately
based on and dependant on end users. End users will always heavily
out-number developers and testers, and they _should_.
Only a tiny percentage of the end users will act as testers. Only a small
percentage of those will contribute code or fixes. But without the end
users _you don't get the testers or developer, either_. If 1% of users
submit bug reports, and 0.01% of users contribute code (pulling all of
these numbers from thin air - I honestly believe the real numbers are
_lower_ based on my own software releases over the years), then you need a
LOT of end users to maintain and develop a distribution.
What you _as a developer_ want are bug reports and fixes. But you aren't
going to get them unless you have enough end users to form the eco-system
that testers and developers spring from. To expect otherwise is to think
that you can raise a crop without the field below it.
What do masses of silent end users bring to the table? Only *everything else*.
> There is RHEL if you need and can afford support and CentOS if you
> don't/can't. A CentOS user is just as much or more a potential future RHEL
> customer as a fedora user - and RH doesn't get paid any more if use fedora.
> They need people who use and test the added features, but what do they gain
> by doing the extra work of backporting fixes into yet another old version.
A large eco-system from which test reporters, bug fixes, developers and new ideas spring.
--
Benjamin Franz
"It is moronic to predict without first establishing an error rate
for a prediction and keeping track of oneâs past record of accuracy."
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled By Randomness
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