ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora

[Jason Stephenson]

Bill McGonigle wrote:
> On Feb 24, 2007, at 10:02, Thomas Charron wrote:
> 
>>  The dependency couldn't be met.  The package maintainer screwed up,
>> and had it dependent on a version of a package that wasn't available.
> 
> Ah, OK, thanks for the correction.
> 
> Still, if I hit that problem I'd go file a bug at bugzilla.redhat.com.  
> Granted I've had mixed success with that avenue.
> 
> Were I desperate I'd grab an SRPM and edit a SPEC file.  That's clearly 
> not something most users know how to do.

Fedora is not aimed at "most users." Fedora is not meant to be stable. 
Go read their mission statement. They're basically the playground for 
Red Hat's commercial releases.

ESR, of all people, should know this.


> This may be a disadvantage of the open source model in a way.  I can 
> edit the SRPM and thus it doesn't get highest priority from the 
> developers.   Apple had a parallel problem with a recent security (or 
> was it Airport driver?) update on the PPC architecture.  They had it 
> fixed 3 hours later - at least in part because they had to.

To me, its an advantage, but then I don't install from binary packages. 
I install everything from source on my servers and workstations, and 
then I know it will generally work if it builds. [There has been 1 
recent exception to this. See below.] I also use FreeBSD and OpenBSD 
mostly. (This is at home. At my alleged day job, I have a mix of 
Windows, FreeBSD, and Fedora servers and workstations to look after.)

BTW, sometimes I find ports that are broken on my configuration, or that 
  don't provide an easy way to enable the features that I want. When I 
encounter these, I fix them and send a patch to the maintainer of the 
port. I usually get a polite "thank you" and notice that some of my 
changes end up in the Makefile the next time that I update.

I have also found 1 port that would build and install and simply refused 
to function on one machine. I downloaded the latest package from the 
developer and installed that. It worked perfectly. The version in ports 
was two years old apparently, and didn't play well with amd64. I'm only 
slightly embarrassed to admit that the package in question is imap-uw.

I have also been known to change the source of various applications to 
add features, etc. I usually send patches off to the respective maintainers.

This is how "open source" is supposed to work according to ESR. However, 
I think he's become lazy and has forgotten how his bazaar really works. 
It sounds to me in his latest ravings that he really wants his software 
to come perfectly formed from the priests of the cathedral. He's 
forgotten the freedom and responsibility that comes from having access 
to the source code, and instead he'd rather be at the mercy of his 
vendor, just like "most users." Rather, he'd prefer that his vendor got 
it right in the first place, unfortunately he's forgotten just who his 
vendor is.

> For somebody whose CS isn't as rusty as mine - I think one should be 
> able to setup a dedicated process to watch a repo and build graphs of 
> dependencies and preemptively find this kind of breakage.  Comments?

Yes, you probably could, but that's what the million monkeys on the 
Internet are doing for you when they install stuff and it doesn't work. 
In this case, people are cheaper than software.

Just my .02 dollars.