Lamar Owen wrote:
If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. And if you haven't
measured it, why, if you release it, should someone install it?
To help develop and test it perhaps? Fedora is a community, not a product.
I thought rawhide was the place for testing.
Yes, a user typically doesn't care about that. But a user SHOULD care about
it, and learn that truly Free software is a worthwhile goal, regardless of
the inconvenience.
That is a religion, not an observation. Not having a monopoly is what
I'd consider a better goal, and letting competition deliver what is
worthwhile.
While I am one who actually understands your issue, and while I agree with
much of it, at the same time, when I chose to run Fedora 8 on this laptop I
knew (or should have known) what I was getting into, and I also knew that
things would be volatile. This is not an Enterprise distribution, after all.
Do I despise it when I have to hand-patch the VMware source shim to get it to
compile, on a regular basis? Sure I do; but it's as much VMware's fault as
it is Fedora's.
No it isn't. That would be the same for any non-included code. You
can't seriously think that every possible, useful piece of code should
be included in the distribution and all rebuilt whenever any of it is,
can you?
And, for that matter, it's my own fault for choosing a
proprietary virtualization solution on top of an unsupported (by VMware)
distribution; and I accept that responsibility.
But you've got that source that you recompile every time the kernel
breaks your binary.
Do I hate it when a new kernel version comes along that breaks the drivers for
my video card? Sure: but I chose to buy that card, I chose to run Fedora,
and I chose to run the BLOB drivers; so it's my fault as much as it is the
others' fault. Will I submit bug reports? Perhaps; perhaps I'll just wait,
and perhaps I won't blindly update my kernel (very very few kernel bugs
result in remote system compromise, and I run enough layers of security, and
am willing enough to reinstall my system from scratch if need be, to where
it's not an issue). Better, though, is that the manufacturer of my FireGL
V3100 is releasing the source so that it can be integrated upstream, helping
everyone.
Maybe - do you expect the people who don't care about the trouble they
are causing you now to do any better once they are in complete control?
But to bring it back to Java: Fedora is providing the most compatible Java
that is available under a Fedora-compatible license.
Is this horseshoes? Do you get extra points if your code almost works?
This is much like the IPv4 to IPv6 'migration' situation that's been discussed
all over NANOG (and other networking groups) for years;
[...]
The 'purist' solution would have been IPv6 instead of NAT;
The 'purist' approach would have been to use the overspec'd and
underimplemented OSI protocols in the first place instead of IP and not
run out of addresses. But there wasn't a *bsd licensed version to drive
adoption (or a free gov't sponsored directory service)...
use this as a
comparison to the 'purely Free Fedora stance' versus the 'I just want it to
work' stance: many network ops will say (probably correctly!) that NAT set
back the Internet ten years or more on getting IPv6 deployed. Of course, the
overreaching expansion and bloat that is IPv6 didn't help any! Necessity is
the mother of invention; having no necessity produces feeping creaturitis.
Our 'popular network protocol' wasn't designed; it was developed in an
iterative and not well managed process (RFC's? Managed? ROTFL!) ; yet it
works.
I believe there was exactly one non-backwards compatible change when
there were about a dozen hosts connected. Since then, backwards
compatibility and not breaking the existing, installed base has been the
primary concern - and the reason that base has continued to increase.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
