Assesment [LWN.net]

Assesment

Posted Aug 5, 2009 21:25 UTC (Wed) by beuno (guest, #44010)
In reply to: Assesment by jspaleta
Parent article: Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration

People will install random software on their computers no matter where it comes from. Be that getdeb.net, random debs or building from tarballs. This has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand. PPAs address (and improves) those use cases, as well as helping developers and cutting-edge users test out new versions to stabilize them.

The majority of users (way above 90%) will never use a PPA, or install newer versions of the software that's available by default or in the official repositories.

This means that whatever gets frozen in the archive is what the vast majority of the users experience, and distribution developers focus their time on those packages. This is what the efforts are geared towards.

PPAs have nothing to do here. You are plain out wrong and sensationalist.

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Assesment

Posted Aug 5, 2009 22:19 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

I am sensationalist..that is true. I very much enjoy sensations.. don't you?

90% of all users will never touch a PPA? Is that an emotional shoot from the hip estimate or is that a fact based analysis? I'd rather like to avoid emotional statistics if at all possible. So if you can back that up with some verifiable data analysis, please do so.

I do not question that PPAs serve a useful purpose. Having users out there making use of each and every version released by an upstream developer is a very good thing. One could argue that having as many users as possible testing the newest releases as they become available maximizes the benefit to upstream developers. This is at odds with the stated benefits of cross-distro syncing for "preferred" versions. If every release that upstream developers make needs testing..then every release needs to find its way into the hands of users for widespread testing and feedback. Having distributions stagger what they distribute is one way to see a continuum of release testing.

If all the major distros version lock you are more likely to get boom-bust testing cycles where a lot of bugs go unnoticed across multiple releases instead of a flow of bugs and fixes for each upstream release. The natural feedback loop of the release early release often model is at odds with the concept of preferred version-locking.

Perhaps the reality is the fact that version locking that some distributions feel compelled to do for stability reasons is the underlying problem and not the solution. Since upstream development for many projects moves at a fast clip, the multi-year promise by distributions to keep versioning static retards the natural feedback cycle of release early release often that upstream project development makes use of.

-jef

Assesment

Posted Aug 6, 2009 5:44 UTC (Thu) by dfarning (guest, #24102) [Link]

>I am sensationalist..that is true. I very much enjoy sensations.. don't you?

I guess that depends on ones goals. Do you want to be perceived as a developer who looks at the technical pros and cons of a decision or as a marketer gathering support for your product.

One role requires sensationalism the other does not.

david