Some distribution disagreements [LWN.net]

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 17:37 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (guest, #18)
Parent article: Some distribution disagreements

I strongly disagree with the characterization that the Fedora community was not involved in the decision to remove the "Everything" option. In fact, this idea was suggested by community members over five years ago, and is just now. See this bug from August 2000, for example (although please don't contribute to the noise about how great or not great specific individual packages are -- that's a separate issue).

And that's not the first time it's come up. This has been in discussion for a long time.

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Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 19:29 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Ah, but those discussions were all after it had already been removed.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 21:42 UTC (Thu) by pjones (guest, #31722) [Link]

Well, yes and no.

I don't really think it's fair to say the community didn't discuss the change. When it comes down to it, this is a technical change in a package, albiet a very important and visible package.

In general, in Fedora we leave decisions about individual packages up to the maintainer of those packages, and those of packages required by them for their funcionality. In this case, the package is anaconda, and there's actually a fairly strong community of users, both Fedora/RHEL and other distros, using it and contributing. This change has been discussed plenty of times in *that* community, and it's near universally agreed that it's the right thing to do.

There was community involvement; fedora-devel-list wasn't where it all took place.

Asside from that, "community" does not mean "democracy". It's nice when we can get concencus from everybody that every change is good, but for any Open Source software to work, somebody has the power and responsibility of making decisions, even unpopular ones, and somebody else, who might not like the change, doesn't hold enough sway to rule against it.

If people want to the power to make or stop changes like this one, they need to become involved in more ways than simply posting about their dismay to the list. Some people have, and some people haven't. As far as I know, all of the people who are actively involved with anaconda development, especially with regards to package selection, support the removal of the "everything" option.

Sorry for the rant.