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Fedora defers systemd to F15

From:  Kevin Fenzi <kevin-AT-scrye.com>
To:  devel-AT-lists.fedoraproject.org
Subject:  Meeting summary/minutes from today's FESCo meeting (2010-09-14)
Date:  Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:01:03 -0600
Message-ID:  <20100914160103.01e3c81d@ohm.scrye.com>
Archive‑link:  Article

===================================
#fedora-meeting: FESCO (2010-09-14)
===================================

Meeting started by nirik at 19:30:01 UTC. The full logs are available at
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2010-09-1...

Meeting summary
---------------
* init process  (nirik, 19:30:01)
  * pjones and ajax are traveling today, will not be able to attend.
    (nirik, 19:30:30)

* Updates policy status  (nirik, 19:33:02)
  * LINK: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Kevin/Updates_Policy_...
    (nirik, 19:34:12)
  * ACTION: nirik (and anyone else who wishes) to work on the updates
    policy wiki page for next week.  (nirik, 20:02:44)
  * ACTION: SMParrish to work on metrics  (nirik, 20:02:53)
  * ACTION: SMParrish and mjg59 to work on ideas for kde updates in
    stable releases.  (nirik, 20:04:09)

* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNSSEC_on_workstat...  (nirik,
  20:05:55)

* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/GoldLinkerDefault  (nirik,
  20:10:07)

* #461 F14 blessing for systemd  (nirik, 20:12:29)
  * LINK: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_initialization_...
    and http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_initialization_...
    (nirik, 20:38:06)
  * ACTION: : will defer systemd to f15 release to give more time to fix
    small issues and docs and general polish.  (nirik, 21:12:43)
  * ACTION: notting will look at what's required to flip the default in
    f14  (notting, 21:13:44)

* #464 - Fix nss update issues  (nirik, 21:15:31)

* Open Floor  (nirik, 21:32:28)
  * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488968   (nirik,
    21:33:57)
  * LINK: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/2387
    (nirik, 21:34:06)

Meeting ended at 21:38:58 UTC.




Action Items
------------
* nirik (and anyone else who wishes) to work on the updates policy wiki
  page for next week.
* SMParrish to work on metrics
* SMParrish and mjg59 to work on ideas for kde updates in stable
  releases.
* : will defer systemd to f15 release to give more time to fix small
  issues and docs and general polish.
* notting will look at what's required to flip the default in f14




Action Items, by person
-----------------------
* mjg59
  * SMParrish and mjg59 to work on ideas for kde updates in stable
    releases.
* nirik
  * nirik (and anyone else who wishes) to work on the updates policy
    wiki page for next week.
* notting
  * notting will look at what's required to flip the default in f14
* SMParrish
  * SMParrish to work on metrics
  * SMParrish and mjg59 to work on ideas for kde updates in stable
    releases.
* **UNASSIGNED**
  * : will defer systemd to f15 release to give more time to fix small
    issues and docs and general polish.




People Present (lines said)
---------------------------
* nirik (177)
* notting (61)
* mjg59 (61)
* mclasen (46)
* SMParrish (17)
* emaldona_mtv (15)
* jsmith (14)
* drago01 (13)
* gholms (12)
* zodbot (11)
* fenris02 (7)
* poelcat (5)
* lmacken (4)
* adamw (2)
* jankratochvil (2)
* mclasen_afk (1)
* pjones (0)
* ajax (0)
* kylem (0)
* cwickert (0)
--
19:30:01 <nirik> #startmeeting FESCO (2010-09-14)
19:30:01 <zodbot> Meeting started Tue Sep 14 19:30:01 2010 UTC.  The chair is nirik. Information
about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
19:30:01 <zodbot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #halp #info #idea #link #topic.
19:30:01 <nirik> #meetingname fesco
19:30:01 <nirik> #chair mclasen notting nirik SMParrish kylem ajax pjones cwickert mjg59
19:30:01 <nirik> #topic init process
19:30:01 <zodbot> The meeting name has been set to 'fesco'
19:30:01 <zodbot> Current chairs: SMParrish ajax cwickert kylem mclasen mjg59 nirik notting pjones
19:30:30 <nirik> #info pjones and ajax are traveling today, will not be able to attend.
19:30:55 * mclasen present
19:31:02 <notting> pjones also said he'd be out next week too
19:31:04 * notting is here
19:31:05 * SMParrish here
19:31:08 * nirik nods. yep.
19:31:36 <mjg59> Here
19:31:51 <nirik> cool. I think thats enough of us to get started...
19:32:18 <nirik> We have 3 updates related tickets. Should we just do them in one "Updates policy
status" section? ;)
19:32:38 <mjg59> Seems reasonable
19:33:02 <nirik> #topic Updates policy status
19:33:11 <nirik> .fesco 351
19:33:12 <zodbot> nirik: #351 (Create a policy for updates) - FESCo - Trac -
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/351
19:33:16 <nirik> .fesco 382
19:33:17 <zodbot> nirik: #382 (Implementing Stable Release Vision) - FESCo - Trac -
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/382
19:33:22 <nirik> .fesco 454
19:33:23 <zodbot> nirik: #454 (pre-release update acceptance criteria) - FESCo - Trac -
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/454
19:33:36 <nirik> so, on the first one we are just waiting for autoqa.
19:33:54 <nirik> on the second one, I whipped up a wiki page for docs the other day:
19:34:12 <nirik> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Kevin/Updates_Policy_...
19:34:37 <nirik> this is based on Ajax and notting's work for the stable updates part + rawhide and
branched from the pre-release updates policy ticket.
19:35:04 <nirik> It needs more work I think... but I wanted to get it down and see if the idea
seems like a good one.
19:35:16 <nirik> ie, a single page that lists the updates policy for each of the various branches
we have.
19:35:33 <nirik> thoughts?
19:35:38 <notting> shiny. (also, tl;dr yet)
19:35:50 <mclasen> nirik: nice start
19:36:15 <nirik> yeah, length could be a issue... unless we index it well perhaps.
19:36:21 <mclasen> nirik: maybe it should be 'Beta to Pre-release
19:36:31 <mclasen> otherwise the two sections appear to overlap
19:36:44 <mclasen> or is that intended ?
19:36:51 <nirik> mclasen: good point. No, that seems a mistake
19:37:15 <nirik> perhaps we could link to the schedule where needed.
19:37:20 <notting> nirik: also, non-critical path updates only have a defined time requirement IFF
they don't get the proper amount of karma
19:37:25 <notting> they can go out sooner w/testing
19:37:29 <nirik> true.
19:37:46 * nirik may have munged things when squashing them all together on the page.
19:38:19 <nirik> I wanted also to have a sense of:
19:38:35 <nirik> rawhide: try not to break things, but major updates are fine, and updates often
are just fine too.
19:38:52 <nirik> branched: trying to make a release here, please try and slow down, avoid major
release, etc.
19:39:05 <nirik> stable: try and stay stable, no api/abi, major ui changes, etc.
19:40:43 <mclasen> nirik: for the rawhide section,  'feel free to push the latest release' should
perhaps be relativized to say 'as long as you are confident that it will go stable in time for the
next fedora release' ?
19:40:45 <nirik> I'd really like to finish something this term if we can. ;) Even if we have to do
a special working session to get things polished.
19:40:52 * mclasen had that issue with gnome3 this cycle...
19:40:57 <nirik> mclasen: yeah, good one. yep.
19:41:14 <nirik> of course you can't always know.
19:41:43 <mclasen> no, best guess...
19:42:13 <nirik> There is always Epoch if needed.
19:43:53 <nirik> In other news I added some more things to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Lessons
19:44:14 <nirik> SMParrish: any news on metrics and/or kde sig kde update plan?
19:44:59 <mjg59> I didn't get to work on that this week
19:45:06 <mjg59> My fault
19:45:06 <nirik> ok
19:45:17 <SMParrish> nirik: Nothing yet.  should get it together by next week
19:45:40 <nirik> ok.
19:46:02 <nirik> I can fold in comments from above to the doc (or you guys can). Work on it over
the next week and if it looks good, vote on it?
19:46:12 <mclasen> sounds good
19:46:47 <nirik> should we put this in force if we don't have the rest of the vision addressed
yet?
19:46:51 <nirik> or should it be all at once?
19:47:29 <notting> nirik: works for me
19:47:46 <SMParrish> seems like we have already been implementing bits as they are ready
19:47:56 <mclasen> nirik: I haven't talked to lmacken yet about getting different policys
implemented in bodhi
19:48:13 <mclasen> I'll check with him sometime this week
19:48:16 <nirik> mclasen: yeah, the prerelease thing should not need to be done until next cycle,
so that should be ok.
19:49:31 <nirik> do we want to talk about some of the other sections? Perhaps metrics? How and what
metrics should we gather?
19:49:51 * nirik notes we are over 15min... didn't see my alarm. Do folks want to continue on this?
or move on for now?
19:51:25 * nirik wonders if anyone is paying attention.
19:51:46 <mjg59> We should probably think about metrics
19:51:54 <mjg59> By "think" I mean "talk"
19:52:16 <nirik> Thats fine with me if we would like to spend a few minutes on that...
19:52:35 <mjg59> So, the first thing we probably need to count is the numer of updates we get per
release
19:52:39 <nirik> the board vision has: "Project members should be able to transparently measure or
monitor a new updates process to objectively measure its effectiveness, and determine whether the
updates process is achieving the aforementioned vision statements"
19:53:21 <mjg59> Measuring the quality is somewhat harder
19:53:49 <mjg59> The total amount of negative karma that hit packages that went to stable?
19:54:01 <mjg59> Can we still generate that for previous releases?
19:54:04 <nirik> we do have https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/metrics/?release=F14
19:54:45 <mclasen> bodhi does keep the number of updates already, no ?
19:54:49 <mclasen> a right
19:54:50 <nirik> we could probibly get lmacken to do some. I'd like to note tho that we should have
regular reports or some way to get stats we want without having to ask for them...
19:54:50 <SMParrish> I guess quality could be measured somewhat by bugs filed
19:55:00 <mjg59> Yeah, these seem like the right figures
19:55:17 <drago01> SMParrish: not really
19:55:41 <mjg59> SMParrish: We'd need to identify whether the bug was filed against stable or
updates-testing
19:56:59 <mclasen> we probably also want to keep a list of 'problematic' updates (like the stuff
thats on the wiki page)
19:57:17 <nirik> so # of updates would be usefull (but we might already have that). Total amount of
karma perhaps? (to see if more testing is happening)
19:57:25 <mjg59> Does abrt identify the source of a package?
19:57:34 <mjg59> ie, whether it was pulled from stable or updates-testing?
19:57:53 <nirik> SMParrish: you still willing to work on this? might be worth talking with lmacken
about what stats we _could_ get from bodhi
19:57:57 <mjg59> It's not perfect, but it ought to be reasonably fair
19:58:22 * lmacken answered mjg59's question during last weeks meeting (total # of stable updates
w/ negative karma)
19:58:59 <nirik> lmacken: sure, we just may want to have some way to see that on the fly or in a
regular report...
19:59:02 <SMParrish> nirik: Yes I'll keep on it
19:59:16 <nirik> mjg59: I don't think abrt mentions repo... just package version.
19:59:47 <nirik> lmacken: you have posted some reports in the past to the list I seem to recall. Do
you remember what all was in those?
20:00:05 <lmacken> nirik: yep, I added it to bodhi's metrics generator, and it will be exposed in
the web interface at some point soon
20:01:07 <lmacken> nirik: yeah, http://lewk.org/blog/bodhi-stats-20100608 I've added a bunch more
metrics to that since then.  I'll be generating a new report with the new bodhi release that I'm
trying to get out the door now
20:01:37 <nirik> lmacken: cool.
20:01:52 <nirik> would it be possible to list even older releases too? or those are no longer in
the db?
20:01:53 <mjg59> nirik: Well, we could certainly cross-reference that to see how many bugs are
filed on packages that never get into stable against ones that do
20:02:09 <lmacken> nirik: yeah, I have db snapshots of previous releases.
20:02:24 <nirik> mjg59: true.
20:02:44 <nirik> #action nirik (and anyone else who wishes) to work on the updates policy wiki page
for next week.
20:02:53 <nirik> #action SMParrish to work on metrics
20:03:22 <nirik> mjg59 / SMParrish: you guys still ok to try and work on some plan for kde?
20:03:33 <mjg59> nirik: Well, to write up pros and cons, yeah
20:03:49 <nirik> ok.
20:03:54 <SMParrish> nirik: yes
20:04:09 <nirik> #action SMParrish and mjg59 to work on ideas for kde updates in stable releases.
20:04:18 <nirik> ok, anything else here? or shall we move on for now?
20:05:32 <mjg59> Nothing from me
20:05:48 <mclasen> move on
20:05:52 <nirik> ok, moving along then...
20:05:55 <nirik> #topic http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNSSEC_on_workstat...
20:05:56 <nirik> .fesco 434
20:05:57 <zodbot> nirik: #434 (F15Feature - DNSSEC_on_workstations -
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNSSEC_on_worksta...) - FESCo - Trac -
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/434
20:05:58 <nirik> any news here?
20:06:28 <nirik> don't see any answers on the talk page.
20:06:36 <nirik> any feature owners for it present?
20:07:04 * nirik doesn't see any.
20:07:10 * mclasen had some discussion with dcbw about that feature
20:07:41 <mclasen> and he was planning to use dnsmasq, so there may be some need to synchronize
between the feature owners and dcbw
20:07:57 <nirik> ok. So, ping again, defer to next week?
20:08:26 * mclasen opts for deferring
20:08:36 <mclasen> I may try to find the feature owners during the week
20:09:02 * nirik is fine with that.
20:09:43 <nirik> any objections? will move on if not.
20:10:07 <nirik> #topic http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/GoldLinkerDefault
20:10:07 <nirik> .fesco 423
20:10:08 <zodbot> nirik: #423 (F15Feature: GoldLinkerDefault -
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/GoldLinkerDefault) - FESCo - Trac -
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/423
20:10:11 <nirik> any news on this one?
20:10:50 * mclasen hasn't heard anything
20:11:02 <nirik> yeah, so ping again I think and try again next week also.
20:11:03 <notting> nor have i
20:11:51 <nirik> ok, will move on if no objections...
20:12:29 <nirik> #topic #461 F14 blessing for systemd
20:12:34 <nirik> .fesco 461
20:12:35 <zodbot> nirik: #461 (F14 blessing for systemd) - FESCo - Trac -
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/461
20:12:49 <nirik> This is kinda moot now I think, but I wanted to bring it up here for two things:
20:12:59 <nirik> a) any more feedback on this from fesco folks
20:13:22 <mclasen> we have had two or three systemd & initscripts updates in the meantime
20:13:25 <nirik> b) is there any way we could mark or otherwise setup things so trac tickets that
need attention between meetings could be seen and acted on by fesco members?
20:13:34 <notting> well, i would like *actual* decisions, not just tacit lack of response
20:14:00 <mjg59> tbh, by the time I had a chance to look at it it seemed pretty clear which
direction the discussion was going in
20:14:16 <mjg59> But I sould probably have explicitly indicated my support for that, so sorry about
that
20:14:27 <nirik> I'm a bit worried about systemd, since it's such a big change to a core system,
but I gave a +1 anyhow. I think the pros outweigh the cons, IMHO.
20:15:10 * notting is still pretty nervous about it. for example, that request to review the
chapter? there's very little you can add there except 'it's all screwed up' no.
20:15:11 <nirik> so would any other fesco folks care to vote?
20:15:12 <notting> now.
20:15:34 <nirik> yeah. ;(
20:15:46 * mclasen hasn't kept up with the schedule too closely, how long do we have till beta
closes for good ?
20:16:00 <notting> tomorrow
20:16:17 <mjg59> +1
20:16:19 <nirik> and the test composes have all been using systemd of course.
20:16:22 <notting> actually, that says 'today'
20:16:58 <notting> and there are still some pretty gaping holes in the plan
20:17:17 <mclasen> notting: I don't know that that chapter is in much worse shape that e.g. the
networking section is wrt to network manager
20:17:29 <nirik> notting: are you advocating punting? or just expressing concerns?
20:18:39 <notting> mclasen: that chapter at least describes NM, albeit incompletely
20:19:45 <notting> nirik: i would feel more comfortable having more time to fix the stuff i know
about
20:20:11 <mclasen> nottin: oh, you are right, there is more than I had seen
20:21:17 <nirik> is there anything more we could do to try and make it work out better for f14?
20:21:28 <nirik> I was thinking another test day after beta might be good.
20:22:03 <nirik> we could try and get someone to help re-do that chapter.
20:22:13 <notting> but there are many ways that it could be redone
20:22:15 <mclasen> nirik: that is a good idea (test day repeat)
20:22:28 <notting> we could point it at systemadm, which is an entirely different tool with a
different usage set
20:22:29 * mclasen is writing down notes for the chapter currently
20:22:36 <notting> we could try and port some of the underlying s-c-services code to systemd
20:22:49 <notting> we could say 'well, you need to also look for these systemd services and do this
other thing'
20:23:43 <nirik> I'll note that it doesn't currently have anything about upstart (/etc/init/
/etc/event.d/) in there.
20:23:52 * mclasen thinks that for f14, it will be enough to point out the things that don't work
as they used to
20:24:04 <notting> nirik: there aren't system services in upstart. there are in systemd
20:24:16 <nirik> yeah... true.
20:24:28 <mclasen> e.g. s-c-services still works, doesn't it
20:24:30 <mclasen> ?
20:24:42 <notting> mclasen: not if you attempt to disable, say, NM or avahi
20:24:53 <mclasen> oh, hmm
20:25:10 <nirik> right... the 'special case' ones that have a unit file.
20:25:53 <notting> but, then again, s-c-services apparently complies regexes that it uses to parse
chkconfig output
20:26:11 <mclasen> ugh
20:26:13 <nirik> I guess I would lean toward: all this stuff is the same, except these: where you
will need systemadm
20:26:35 <notting> nirik: systemadm doesn't enable/disable services, though
20:27:06 <mclasen> does chkconfig not work for NM or avahi, either ?
20:27:50 <notting> mclasen: it will happily run and correctly enable/disable/etc the sysv
service... which doesn't have any effect.
20:28:08 * gholms rings the 15 minute bell
20:28:23 * mclasen thought there was some plan to make chkconfig fall back to systemctl ?
20:28:35 <nirik> sorry, I mean systemctl I guess.
20:28:42 <nirik> +1 to continue for a few minutes...
20:28:55 <notting> mclasen: there is. but i haven't finished that yet.
20:29:22 <mclasen> would finishing that make s-c-services work again ? (considering the
regexes...)
20:29:29 <notting> yes
20:30:23 <notting> (assuming it's feasible)
20:30:41 <nirik> so, votes to continue?
20:31:00 <mclasen> +1
20:32:13 <nirik> hopefully if chkconfig/s-c-services could be made to use systemctl we could leave
that chapter mostly alone?
20:32:13 <SMParrish> +1
20:32:29 <mjg59> +1
20:32:53 <mclasen> if we don't get that, then we'll have to assemble a list of 'native systemd'
services and explain how to use systemctl for them
20:32:59 <nirik> is there any plan for systemadm to handle enable/disable?
20:33:22 <notting> dunno. imo, systemadm needs some quality time with mizmo/mccann
20:33:39 <nirik> yeah.
20:33:45 <notting> but that's probably neither here nor there
20:33:47 <mclasen> not that it is any worse than s-c-services...
20:34:31 * notting disagrees, but that's OT
20:34:53 <notting> probably shouldn't have brought it up
20:35:07 <nirik> so, any other votes or opinions? anyone advocate we punt to f15 strongly?
20:36:12 <poelcat> what is the downside of waiting for Fedora 15 when this feature can be fully
ready?
20:36:22 <mclasen> notting: actually, you are right about s-c-services
20:36:27 * nirik thought this would be a hot issue, but it's seeming to be full of apathy.
20:36:35 <mclasen> we don't have a clear definition of 'fully ready'
20:37:02 <poelcat> wouldn't that be a good place to start? :)
20:37:25 <nirik> poelcat: we would need to revert changes made for it. We would lose press and
'buzz' about it. It's unclear how much testing it would get in rawhide (or what kind).
20:37:58 <gholms> It would still get testing for the entirety of another release branching.
20:38:06 <nirik> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_initialization_... and
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_initialization_...
20:38:28 <mjg59> poelcat: Because, realistically, the time for a go/no-go decision is not now
20:38:29 <SMParrish> nirik: but what about the bad press if it bombs at release
20:38:29 * mclasen predicts that the things that make us nervous now would still make us nervous,
come f15 branching time
20:38:30 <jsmith> nirik: You'd know better than I would, but I'm not sure reverting those changes
is a big deal.
20:38:38 <jsmith> mjg59: If not now, when?
20:38:50 <mjg59> Before we started composing test releases for the beta at the very latest
20:38:56 * jsmith isn't taking sides one way or the other -- he just wants a *strong* decision in
one direction
20:38:56 <nirik> SMParrish: sure, thats something to avoid...
20:39:13 <jsmith> mjg59: We start on TCs on Thursday, if I remember the schedule correctly
20:39:29 <notting> mjg59: sure. that's why the ticket was filed 6 days ago
20:39:32 <nirik> jsmith: well, I know we made changes in livecd-tools, and there's possibly
anaconda and docs changes, features/marketing/press changes.
20:39:41 <poelcat> mjg59: the test day was held before the TC so a decision could be made
20:39:52 * nirik would like to appologize for not having this at the last fesco meeting.
20:40:29 <notting> nirik: what changed in livecd-tools relative to this?
20:40:47 <nirik> I thought we made some change, but I could be mistaken.
20:40:48 * nirik looks.
20:41:08 <jsmith> mjg59: I think this is too important to just leave up to "decision by default"
20:41:23 <mjg59> I'm sorry, the ticket indicated that the test composes started on the 9th
20:41:25 <jsmith> mjg59: We either need to be confident that it's ready, or be willing to say "no"
20:42:08 <notting> mjg59: yeah, it was tight, but the idea was 'have test day', 'decide after
getting test day results'
20:42:09 <nirik> notting: oh, my mistake, that was some changes in ks files.
20:42:12 <mjg59> Ok. We could certainly drop it now, at the risk of finding that something
unexpected has started depending on its semantics.
20:42:25 <mjg59> And by "drop" I mean "push out"
20:42:28 <nirik> for firstboot I think.
20:42:30 <jsmith> Right...
20:42:41 <jsmith> So what's the bigger risk?
20:43:05 <drago01> try it out ... go back with a timemachine and tell us ;)
20:43:08 <mjg59> Well, the bigger risk is presumably keeping it, but that's true of every package
update since we branched F14
20:43:29 <gholms> What's the point of a fallback if people are loathe to use it?
20:43:34 * nirik is still a weak +1. I am nervous about it, but I think it can be ready. I would
definitely like to have lots of attention on it and try and get it as polished as possible...
20:43:35 <SMParrish> If on release day we cannot guarantee that F14 works out the box, then we need
to push it to F15
20:43:48 <mjg59> gholms: Because it's not absolutely clear that the fallback is preferable
20:44:05 <gholms> s/loathe/loath/
20:44:20 <mjg59> If it were obvious that systemd was causing signfiicant problems then I'd have no
qualms about saying that we push it for F15
20:44:21 <SMParrish> I want it in F14 but not at the expense of 1000s of users without bootable and
stable systems
20:44:21 <jsmith> SMParrish: We can't wait 'til release day to make that decision.  The beta change
freeze is *today*
20:44:54 <nirik> mjg59: me too.
20:45:13 <mjg59> SMParrish: Do we have any reason to believe that it's more likely to leave systems
unbootable now than in 6 months?
20:45:25 <SMParrish> jsmith: right what I meant was if we cannot gurantee that based on the systemd
of today we need to push it
20:45:27 <mjg59> SMParrish: If we're concerned about upgrades then pushing it out a release doesn't
help much
20:45:47 <mjg59> SMParrish: We're not going to get a significantly increased quantity of testing on
that basis
20:46:02 <notting> adamw: where did you post that big systemd checklist i had? (if anywhere)
20:46:20 <gholms> mjg59: The entirety of the F15 branching won't help flush out more bugs at all?
20:46:32 <nirik> notting: the second of these:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_initialization_... and
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_initialization_...
20:46:47 <SMParrish> mjg59: but 6 more months of development and testing is a plus.  Its nice to be
first but no at the expense of our user base
20:46:54 <nirik> gholms: it may... although there will not be any new install testing.
20:47:02 <mjg59> SMParrish: Yes, but testing under what circumstances?
20:47:19 * nirik notes we are at another 15min now. Votes to continue again?
20:47:20 * gholms rings the 35 minute gong
20:47:31 <mjg59> This conversation is pointless without determining what our criteria are
20:47:39 <mjg59> "We don't know it's ready" isn't helpful. We'll never know that.
20:47:43 <mclasen> SMParrish: has there been any indication that our userbase will suffer ? IMO,
there have not been many problems of that sort with systemd
20:47:58 <jsmith> I thought notting did a pretty good job of enumerating the criteria for init
tools
20:47:59 <notting> mjg59: that was the point of me trying to define such criteria (see the linked
pages)
20:48:11 <mjg59> notting: I agree, but I don't think that's what we seem to be talking aout
20:48:22 <notting> alas, there's no data on that other than some handwavy 'we pointed testday
people at that told them to file bugs'
20:48:22 <mclasen> we had listed a number of 'blocker' bugs in the ticket. have all of them
addressed yet ?
20:49:20 <notting> mclasen: there's still one where starting the network deadlocks until systemd's
timeout kicks in
20:49:33 <SMParrish> mclasen: Not saying there are any issues, just looking at the what if and the
blackeye Fedora will have if it does not work as described
20:50:01 <jsmith> The whole reason we rescheduled the systemd test day was to give more input on
problems people might encounter
20:50:15 <jsmith> If you have suggestions for how we can improve that, please add them to the F14
retrospective page
20:50:17 <mclasen> SMParrish: 'what if' is not really helpful...we've had a test day to identify
issues...
20:50:26 <mjg59> SMParrish: The main risk that I see is in some unexpected case where upgrades
break. It's not clear that delaying a release results in a significant reduction of that
possibility.
20:50:33 <drago01> smooge: by that logic we can never ship anything new
20:50:35 <drago01> err
20:50:40 <drago01> SMParrish: ^^
20:50:51 <mjg59> The test day idenitified some issues and the majority of them have been fixed
20:51:33 <mjg59> From a technical perspective I'm fairly happy that the code works pretty much as
it should do and that there's a high probability that any significant issues discovered will be
fixed in a sufficiently timely manner
20:51:36 <notting> mjg59: my concern is less "OMG crash and burn" and more "argh warts warts
everywhere"
20:51:54 * mclasen unfortunately has to leave this discussion now
20:52:04 * mclasen left his vote on the ticket, anyway
20:52:08 <adamw> notting: sorry, bit late, but mostly i turned them into the systemd test day test
cases
20:52:09 <mjg59> notting: Yeah, understandable
20:52:23 <adamw> notting: otherwise i've just been referring to your post from the ml archives, i
haven't re-posted it anywhere
20:52:51 <mjg59> But I think there's a risk that we end up holding systemd to a higher standard
than we have any other piece of code
20:53:07 <mjg59> Which I'm not averse to, but if we do that we should be more consistent across the
rest of the distribution
20:53:17 <notting> mjg59: it's init. it *should* be held to a higher standard than other things.
20:53:28 <mjg59> notting: I agree, but upstart was hardly without warts
20:53:39 <SMParrish> mjg59: but as an integral part of the core system it should be held to a
higher standard
20:54:03 <mjg59> If I felt that the rest of the distribution were entirely without warts than I'd
worry about that more
20:55:00 <nirik> if there's specific items people are looking at, I'd like to hear them... as I
said, I think the pros outweigh the cons currently, but perhaps I am missing some data?
20:55:39 <mjg59> And, of course, there's the argument that shipping something that's good enough
means that we'll get enough testing that by F15 it'll be excellent
20:55:49 <mjg59> Which would not necessarily be the case otherwise
20:56:41 <nirik> so, where are we here? votes? further details?
20:57:18 <mjg59> I still lean towards +1 for shipping it
20:57:34 * gholms notes 45 minutes have passed
20:58:09 * nirik is still a weak +1 barring any data about blocking issues he doesn't currently
have.
20:58:24 <notting> mclasen was +1
20:58:41 <notting> SMParrish: ?
20:58:43 <SMParrish> I'm still +1 as well.  Just want to be prepared
20:58:56 <nirik> it's a short runway, and I think we should try and devote more resources to it
until release if we can to make sure it works out well.
20:59:19 <notting> and we have four absent members
20:59:29 <jsmith> Some voted in the ticket, no?
20:59:41 <nirik> jsmith: nope.
20:59:48 <notting> none of whom commented in the ticket
21:00:21 <jsmith> :-(
21:00:26 <nirik> so where do we go from here? ;)
21:00:38 <drago01> option 3
21:00:41 <notting> was our quorum process always '5', or 'majority of present'?
21:00:41 <gholms> Anyone else here care to vote?
21:00:42 <drago01> i.e slip
21:01:17 <nirik> notting: I thought it was always 5. we did have 5 at the start of the meeting.
21:01:24 <notting> nirik: i mean for voting/approval
21:01:52 <nirik> yeah, at least 5 to approve something, by which case this isn't approved. ;) But
it's deadline is already passed, so...
21:02:04 <gholms> notting: Have you voted yet?
21:02:18 <mjg59> Yeah, we're +4 and notting hasn't voted
21:02:43 <notting> gholms: that's sort of the point. i can stand up here and say '-1' and
unilaterally sieze power and force it out myself. feels wrong, even if i'm not really thrilled
about it
21:03:01 <mjg59> notting: If you don't feel comfortable with it, then we should push it to F15
21:03:19 <mjg59> I've voted based on my feelings, but I'm not averse to the alternative
21:04:00 <notting> mjg59: no, but i shouldn't be the sole decider on the feature just because
pjones is flying to hawaii, etc.
21:04:01 * nirik values notting's opinion... especially since he's worked so closely on this
21:04:04 <notting> but bleah, democracy
21:04:38 <gholms> If you're -1 on it you should still say so.  I'm sure you have reasons for your
opinion either way.  :-\
21:05:02 <mjg59> Eh. Based on notting's discomfort and expertise, I'm happy to change to -1
21:05:31 <mjg59> If I'm going to argue that we need a more conservative approach to some of our
updates, that should also apply to core functionality when we're this near a release
21:05:33 <notting> mjg59: i'm not a full -1. it's just that slipping gives us more time to fix the
stuff i know needs to get fixed at some point (chkconfig, etc.)
21:05:59 <mjg59> Ok. So let's slip it to F15.
21:06:08 <mjg59> Lennart's sufficiently stoic to cope
21:06:32 <nirik> ok.
21:06:38 <SMParrish> notting: if thats the case then lets slip it.  Would rather err on the side of
caution
21:07:49 <nirik> ok, so slip to f15? final answer? ;)
21:08:04 <mjg59> +1 to slipping
21:08:21 <mjg59> But we're not going to get quorum on that either :)
21:08:24 <notting> 'defer' is probably better wording
21:08:47 <mjg59> Yeah, I agree
21:09:01 <nirik> action: will defer systemd to f15 release to give more time to fix small issues
and docs and general polish.
21:09:02 <nirik> ?
21:09:17 <mjg59> Sounds good to me
21:09:21 <nirik> I guess we no longer have quorum, but if we don't approve this, doesn't it mean
it's defered?
21:09:41 <notting> nirik: it's sort of the inverse of approving keeping it
21:10:19 <nirik> yeah, but that seems like a tricky thing... just propose something and don't get
it passed and that means to revert it?
21:10:36 <SMParrish> with today being the cutoff we have to act either by approving it or short of
that it goes to f15 by default
21:10:53 <notting> nirik: consider it a late feature exception? i duno.
21:10:54 <mjg59> I think if we don't explicitly approve it then it's reasonable to think that it's
defered
21:11:16 <nirik> SMParrish: ok, as long as we decided that eariler with quorum I'd be ok with that.
(which I think we did when the feature was approved?)
21:11:46 <fenris02> mjg59, wouldnt an upgrade simply retain upstart?
21:11:48 <mjg59> We approved it on the assumption that we'd think it was ready to be used by
default
21:11:59 <notting> fenris02: not as the packages are currently constructed
21:12:11 <fenris02> notting, oh.  euw.
21:12:24 <notting> so, does this mean i get to untangle the dependencies to enact the reversion?
21:12:25 * nirik wishes we had a clear quorum/vote on this...
21:12:35 <nirik> notting: sure! :)
21:12:43 <nirik> #action: will defer systemd to f15 release to give more time to fix small issues
and docs and general polish.
21:12:55 <nirik> anything more on this? or move on now?
21:12:58 <fenris02> if an upgrade kept upstart it would be far easier to let systemd fly forward.
21:13:05 <drago01> no
21:13:06 * gholms lights the 60 minute fireworks
21:13:07 <fenris02> otherwise, it's massively problematic.
21:13:12 <drago01> that is inconsistent
21:13:24 <fenris02> drago01, sure.  but systemd is not stable either.
21:13:35 <drago01> that wasn't the point
21:13:44 <notting> #action notting will look at what's required to flip the default in f14
21:13:46 <fenris02> multiple reboots == different results.  that's not good.
21:13:48 <drago01> either it is good enough for *everybody* or it isn't
21:14:09 <drago01> fenris02: huh?
21:14:34 <poelcat> can we get a compose or nightly with the change made ASAP too so we can shake
out any problems before the RC compose on Thursday?
21:14:42 <nirik> ok, moving along then....
21:14:48 <fenris02> drago01, i've yet to see a properly working system on systemd.  every iso has
different problems.  upgrades currently are disastrous if you switch to systemd forcibly
21:14:50 <nirik> poelcat: yeah, as soon as we sort the deps.
21:15:08 <nirik> fenris02 / drago01: can you guys take this discussion out of band?
21:15:08 <poelcat> cool, i'd hate for the RC to be the first shot at it
21:15:20 <drago01> nirik: was about to say that
21:15:31 <nirik> #topic #464 - Fix nss update issues
21:15:34 <notting> quick straw poll: do we want those currently on f14 branched to get 'upgraded'
back to upstart, or to be left with a systemd install that we may not update with further systemd
fixes?
21:15:34 <nirik> .fesco 464
21:15:35 <zodbot> nirik: #464 (Fix nss update issues) - FESCo - Trac -
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/464
21:15:54 <nirik> notting: humm... back to upstart I would say.
21:16:39 <nirik> ok, so we are running low on time today...
21:16:59 <nirik> I filed this issue. Seems nss has issues more often than perhaps it should.
21:17:01 <notting> i am for this in general, but don't have time to donate to this effort
21:17:26 <nirik> I'd like to see if we can help the maintainer(s) deal with updates here better.
21:17:56 <emaldona_mtv> the maintainer welcomes any advise he can get
21:18:04 <nirik> hey, emaldona_mtv. Welcome. ;)
21:18:36 <emaldona_mtv> i have rectified some of my ways but I still need more to learn
21:18:43 <notting> emaldona_mtv: first question i have: why are nss-softokn, nss-util, and nss
separate, if they're always updated as a unit?
21:18:44 <nirik> I guess I would say the first thing we could try and do is get some smart folks to
look at the current packaging and make suggestions to make it less fragile.
21:19:54 <emaldona_mtv> the motivation stems from the fact that nss-softokn gets updated less
frequently than the rest of nss
21:20:32 <nirik> are they seperate upstream tars?
21:20:43 <notting> that doesn't appear to be the case
21:20:56 <nirik> anyhow, perhaps we could gather a few people and get you together with them to try
and make things less fragile.
21:20:57 <emaldona_mtv> Upstream there is one ane tar. Let me add some more info
21:21:38 <nirik> that would seem to me then that it should just be one nss package.
21:21:59 <emaldona_mtv> softoken is the cryptographic module of nss, it is submitted evry two years
or so for FIPS 140 validation
21:22:33 <emaldona_mtv> it's an issue for RHEL not for fedora. We do want to keep the spec files as
similar as possible
21:23:14 <emaldona_mtv> the previous way of doing things became a maintenance nightmare ...
21:23:32 <emaldona_mtv> new new one is better but has its drawbacks
21:23:47 <notting> emaldona_mtv: how was a single srpm a maintenance nightmare?
21:24:16 <nirik> I dislike that you need buildroot overrides... that leads to problems with
dependending packages getting built against the not pushed version of nss. ;(
21:24:36 <nirik> also, it seems like nss gets updated a lot... if we could see how to make it
update less often in stable releases that would be great.
21:24:57 <emaldona_mtv> there was an ugly hack done on nss.spc to keep softoken behing at the older
fips version
21:25:49 <nirik> since fedora doesn't care at all about FIPS, could we simplify in fedora?
21:26:31 <emaldona_mtv> I don't know how to simplify it and welcome suggestions, ....
21:26:57 * mclasen_afk moves on to rawhide
21:27:38 <nirik> emaldona_mtv: ok, let me try and get a few sharp packaging folks to talk to you
out of meeting?
21:27:56 <nirik> are you going to be available on #fedora-devel channel later? or is email better
to get a hold of you?
21:29:13 <emaldona_mtv> I'm going to be online (give me an hour to grab something to eat)
21:29:20 <nirik> great. thanks. ;)
21:29:31 <nirik> emaldona_mtv: oh, what is the current status of nspr on f12/f13?
21:29:38 <nirik> ie, can the firefox update go out soon?
21:30:10 <emaldona_mtv> for f13 I have build again and as far as my testing goes there should be no
breakage
21:30:54 <emaldona_mtv> making the BuildRequires different from the Requires was the cause of the
breakage
21:31:18 <nirik> another idea I was thinking of is to make a doc on how to update... ie, all the
exact steps, so they can be checked off...
21:31:24 <emaldona_mtv> it should not be done when the packages have devel subpackages
21:32:13 <emaldona_mtv> I was thinking writing a doc with what I have learned and have others
review it
21:32:13 <nirik> anyhow, we can take it out of meeting.
21:32:20 <nirik> yes, I think that would be good.
21:32:28 <nirik> #topic Open Floor
21:32:37 <nirik> we have several more items, but are out of time. ;(
21:32:41 <nirik> anything quickly for open floor?
21:32:57 <gholms> Will everything else be pushed out to next week?
21:33:29 <nirik> I suppose so.... we seem to have a poor record working with trac tickets. ;(
21:33:35 <nirik> The other 2 items I had were:
21:33:56 <nirik> application installer issues
21:33:57 <nirik> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=488968
21:34:04 <nirik> and
21:34:05 <nirik> BuildIdBuild infrastructure
21:34:06 <nirik> https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/2387
21:34:57 <mclasen> that needs more time, I'd say
21:35:08 <nirik> ok, will close out if no one has anything further...
21:36:13 <jankratochvil> The second one is more a question if someone can run createrepo on the
Koji server and say - it takes too much time - or it eats too much memory etc.  The right solution
is to implement it natively into yum but maybe it would work even as-is.
21:37:26 <nirik> jankratochvil: well, the infrastructure lead and the buildsystem maintainer both
say this is not practical currently, so I think another solution must be found.
21:38:05 <nirik> jankratochvil: we can discuss next week? is that ok?
21:38:27 <jankratochvil> ok, this problem lasts for years.
21:38:49 <nirik> yeah.
21:38:50 <nirik> :(
21:38:56 <nirik> ok, thanks for coming everyone!
21:38:58 <nirik> #endmeeting
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to post comments

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 14, 2010 23:47 UTC (Tue) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

Thank goodness for small mercies. Please, this has meet a higher standard of stability than most new additions.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 0:46 UTC (Wed) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link] (113 responses)

> Lennart's sufficiently stoic to cope

Naw,

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-Septe...

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 1:19 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (74 responses)

You know, the man's got a point there. According to his e-mail, he jumped through the hoops, done the dance etc.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 1:32 UTC (Wed) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link] (73 responses)

He may have done all that, but it's not about him, it's about the code. However, his response makes more even more nervous about it. I for one welcome a cautious approach to this. I will probably won't skip F14 like I was planning.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 1:42 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (72 responses)

> He may have done all that, but it's not about him, it's about the code.

Actually, what I wanted to point out is that it is about the process. He was told (like the rest of us that contribute to Fedora) that there are rules to get things done. He followed the rules. And yet, his doohickey got rejected.

PS. I never tried systemd in my life and I honestly don't know how many things are wrong with it. That's the whole point of having a process, I guess. There is supposed to be objective criteria in place that makes sure that users like me get something that meets minimum requirements.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 1:59 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (16 responses)

It's not rejected, it's just deferred for a little while. As a consequence, it will be tested much more thoroughly than would have been possible before F14 release. When it is released as the default in F15 it will be solid, and familiar, and nobody will be cursing Lennart. This looks to me like a win for everybody.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 2:06 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, I get that it's just deferred. However, have a look at these two posts. They confirm what Lennart's frustration is warranted:

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-Septe...
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-Septe...

I seems that "core" features will probably need a slightly different criteria in order to get in as defaults. Looks like systemd was the test case here.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 16:55 UTC (Wed) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

Well, yeah, if there's a set of well-defined criteria for acceptance, then changing those criteria after the fact is a bit of a no-no. I can accept that they want to update the criteria and I can accept that they'd want to test new criteria on a subset of projects before rolling it out to everyone, but it sounds like they didn't tell him, or perhaps they did but not clearly.

To be honest, I'm much less concerned with this project being delayed than I am with the lack of communication. This is not the first distro with serious communications issues (Debian is another, from my own experience), but it is good communication that makes or breaks a project on this scale. Regardless of who did what, where, when and to whom, flawed communication is a serious bug that needs fixing.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 5:03 UTC (Wed) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link] (13 responses)

It's not rejected, it's just deferred for a little while.

"deferred for a little while" *IS* rejected. The vote was whether to include it in F14 or not, and the answer was "not", despite that it apparently met the acceptance criteria.

Possibly the acceptance criteria should have been different for systemd, but since it wasn't, getting voted down is a failure of the process.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 9:19 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (10 responses)

> "deferred for a little while" *IS* rejected.

I find this false statement to be a nice and short summary of what's wrong with Lennart development's attitude. Thanks.

(On the other hand, the way he was let hoping he could make it does not look great either)

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 14:56 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm pretty sure brouhaha is not the userid used by Lennart, so I don't understand how you relate this.

Anyway, to provide a related opinion: Within GNOME module proposals are either accepted or rejected. Then we explain what we want to have it accepted when it is proposed again. Deferred is sometimes used but only when we need more time to make a decision. After that time we will still say 'accepted' or 'rejected'. To be clear, Lennart is not on the GNOME release-team.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 19:15 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

In other words: "Wait for 6 months? I'd rather die".

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 10:00 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

No, that is not "in other words" what I meant, wrote or intended.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 17:03 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (6 responses)

systemd was rejected from F14. Why play language games?

I can relate to Lennart's position, I've been there myself... If systemd wasn't going to be included in F14 anyway, then it turns out all the all-nighters and missed dinners with friends spent getting it in perfect mergeable shape were a complete waste of time. It's a horrible feeling, and seriously demoralizing.

I don't think you're in a position to claim that Lennart's attitude is "wrong". And I can't say that your judgement is showing a real good example of attitude either!

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 19:18 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (5 responses)

Seriously, get a life.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 19:35 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

I'm all for other people not having a "life", if it results in them working on interesting software like systemd instead. :)

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 10:18 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (3 responses)

Suggest if you don't have anything constructive to say to just not respond. Thanks.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 10:44 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

I will be more explicit just for you. I am seriously suggesting that people like Lennart switch to a more adult relation with software development. This means not missing dinners with friends and being generally more relaxed.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 11:04 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

When attempting to suggest someone behave more maturely, it is perhaps best to be mature in one's expression of the notion. "I [suggest] that people like Lennart switch to a more adult relationship with software development. This means not missing dinners with friends and being generally more relaxed." is useful advice, maturely expressed; anyone who takes issue with it (rather than merely declining to follow it) is a jerk.

"Get a life", on the other hand, mostly evokes memories of obnoxious teenagers.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 20, 2010 12:08 UTC (Mon) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

If being an adult means not caring about someone's work, I will happily only employ kids forever more...

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 16:48 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

"deferred for a little while" *IS* rejected. The vote was whether to include it in F14 or not, and the answer was "not", despite that it apparently met the acceptance criteria.

If I understand correctly, it will be included in F14, it just won't be the default. So any F14 user who wants to try it out can turn it on.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 16:35 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

I should have been more specific. The vote was whether it would be included in F14 as the replacement for upstart. It was rejected.

Deferred *is* rejected, since the decision means that it will NEVER ship as part of F14 as the replacement for upstart. It may be accepted for F15, but that won't change the fact that it was rejected for F14, despite having met the acceptance criteria. Any claim that deferring it is somehow not rejecting it is an attempt to dodge responsibility for rejecting it.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 2:03 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (45 responses)

Yes, I think we failed Lennart in terms of process. In our defence, Fedora is currently undergoing something of a shift in priorities in an attempt to ensure that we provide a more stable and useful distribution. In the past I don't think there'd have been any significant argument against systemd going in with, but now we're questioning these things more and I don't think our process has entirely caught up.

But yeah, it's pretty much impossible to avoid empathy with Lennart here. He did everything he was asked to do and more, and then at the last moment we have a short conversation and decide not to use his work by default. I think he's justifiably angry, and I hope we can use this to come up with a policy that provides stronger guidance on the criteria that will be applied to high-profile features.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 2:30 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

It would be nice if there were a way to turn systemd *off* if it started misbehaving. I'm aware that it would probably be twice the work for everybody. For instance, applications might have to be packaged with both an upstart/sysv init script and a systemd init script. But having a working init system is just such an important issue.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 19:17 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

That is exactly the current status: You can use systemd or upstart, your choice. Selectable at boot or via grub configuration.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 2:32 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (38 responses)

he's justifiably angry

I reject that utterly. The machines that will run F14 aren't Lennart's. The people who have to make F14 systems work aren't Lennart. They don't owe Lennart anything. The group that made the decision doesn't owe Lennart anything either; they are supposed to be representing F14 users. Any F14 user who wants to try systemd will. Come F15, systemd will be mature and bulletproof as it should be, and then F15 users will owe Lennart and the early adopters who tried it in F14 a debt of gratitude for having improved their experience. First things first.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 2:45 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think the decision was wrong. I think it's entirely fair that someone who does everything that's asked of them be unhappy if additional criteria are introduced right at the end of the process. We should have been clearer about what we were going to look at in making this decision.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 10:54 UTC (Wed) by njd27 (subscriber, #5770) [Link]

It's a very rare software project that can establish all its "criteria" at the beginning and then proceed to the end without something new cropping up.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 21, 2010 10:34 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>I think it's entirely fair that someone who does everything that's asked of them be unhappy if additional criteria are introduced right at the end of the process.

As an outsider I don't know how this usually works, but I would never expect acceptance criteria to mean 'anything fulfilling these criteria will be accepted', but rather 'anything *not* meeting these criteria will be *rejected*'. I would be somewhat suspicious of a process in which the assumption is the other way round, particularly when it comes to core components.

It sucks to work hard in the hopes of some payoff only to see it not happen for another six months, but I remain unconvinced that such a strong expectation was warranted in the first place.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 2:45 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (23 responses)

Lennart is angry because he decided to do all this work in a hurry in order to get systemd into good enough shape for F-14, only to be told that the rules changed and that his software isn't getting in anyway.

If he was told that a core component like his can only be optional in the first incarnation of Fedora in which it appears, I'm sure he'd be under no pressure to deliver on all of what was considered "blocker" for F-14.

This has absolutely nothing to do with what users of Fedora think about systemd.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 3:00 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (22 responses)

If he hadn't done that work, then systemd wouldn't be ready for optional use in F14, and so wouldn't get thorough field testing before F15, and then would not be ready for default use in F15 either. It's great that Lennart takes on rats' nest problems, but there are reasons why they are rats' nests, and it takes time to get solutions and the world ready for one another. Didn't he learn anything from pushing pulseaudio out before it and the world were ready for one another?

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 3:19 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (21 responses)

> If he hadn't done that work, then systemd wouldn't be ready for optional use in F14

I don't think you can have a blocker against an optional component. So, systemd could have gotten into F-14 as an option, with many of what would otherwise be blocker issues. He wouldn't have to rush to fix any of that - he'd have another 6 months. If only he was told that systemd could not be accepted (I'm not blaming anyone here, just pointing out that process probably needs adjustment).

> Didn't he learn anything from pushing pulseaudio out before it and the world were ready for one another?

He didn't push anything on anyone. That's what the process is for. That's what blocker bugs are all about.

Sure, sometimes things get shipped that are, shall we say, undercooked. Hey, Fedora is not a "shy" distro, so we all learned to cope with this in various ways. The price of progress etc.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 3:35 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (20 responses)

systemd could have gotten into F-14 as an option, with many of what would otherwise be blocker issues

How much field testing would it have got, then, with its blocker issues? Then it wouldn't be ready for F15, and would be (assuming the committee is responsible) optional in that release, too, to be released as the default only in F16.

I'm astonished anybody, Lennart included, seriously considered any alternative to what actually happened.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 3:40 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (19 responses)

> How much field testing would it have got, then, with its blocker issues?

That depends on how many people would be willing to test, I guess. When compiz was introduced, for instance, I was willing to test right away, although the results were not always pleasant.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 6:11 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (18 responses)

> That depends on how many people would be willing to test, I guess.

And that gets to the nub of the problem. How many folks are crying out for a solution to the current init? How many will try systemd before it is forced down their throats? Probably fewer than would have willingly submitted to Pulseaudio in the first couple of years when it was mostly full of fail.

Systemd is wonderful on paper but is likely to impact the real world with about as much mess as PA did. System init is another area where you are likely to run into hundreds of obscure packages which will still be turning up broken years from now. 90% compatible isn't going to cut it here.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 6:46 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (17 responses)

And what exactly is you point here? That software has bugs? We already knew that.

At some point, bullet has to be bitten. If you don't like doing that, stay away from latest Fedora spins. Me - I don't mind trying out a thing or two.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 10:35 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (16 responses)

> At some point, bullet has to be bitten.

Nope, as long the current init system is working acceptably. And it is working better than acceptably, IMHO.

Lets see. One can classify users into four categories regarding their attitude versus changes:

- "new! new! new!" users (1%) will test anything that's new just because. Systemd is certainly ready for those.
- "Features!" users (4%) can accept some breakage (growing pains) if the new stuff provides something of value for them. I don't think systemd has show anything that makes it qualify for those (does it make the system boot any faster?).
- "It's not broken, don't fix it!" kind of users (15%) will reject anything new unless it improves things considerably AND has proven track of stability. systemd is certainly NOT ready for those.
- "I don't care" kind of users (80%) will use whatever comes by default with the distro. They may appreciate any benefit provided, but will not tolerate inconvenience, as usually cannot fix broken things themselves. Also, no score here.

So, to recap: systemd is ready for 1-5% of the users, but seems not ready for the World at large just yet.

Note: all statistics are based on the proven and reliable method of educated guesstimation, aka pulling them out of my hat.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 11:00 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Thanks, I had a good chuckle!

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 14:54 UTC (Wed) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (13 responses)

If that were anywhere near true then 95% of users would be using something like CentOS. The fact is that people do care about having shiny new things, really quite a lot.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 17:18 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (9 responses)

Pretty much. If you don't want to deal with changes then use CentOS or Redhat.

That's the point of them. The last thing we need is another CentOS.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 19:22 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (8 responses)

> If you don't want to deal with changes then use CentOS or Redhat.

There is an enormous distance between Fedora and CentOS, much bigger than what was discussed here.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 2:02 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (4 responses)

Indeed, and are there also an enormous number of additional volunteers to develop something more to your taste?

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 6:36 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (3 responses)

What you still do not get:
- the vast majority of Fedora users (not just me) did NOT ask for systemd, not even for improvements to the current system, whatever ugly it was.
- it takes ZERO volunteer not to develop systemd. How demanding for a taste?

I am totally convinced Lennart is a fantastic developer. Sorry, but "Ooooh! aaaahhh!" does not give him an automatic right to push his software fast forward.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 10:07 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

> - the vast majority of Fedora users (not just me) did NOT ask for systemd, not even for improvements to the current system, whatever ugly it was.

The vast majority of Fedora users have no idea what an init system does and why it is important to have a truly dynamic one. Please go and view that Apple presentation on launchd. Apple is not in the business of pleasing geeks for geeks' sake. They switched to launchd because it is ultimately better for users and developers.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 27, 2010 16:14 UTC (Mon) by topher (guest, #2223) [Link]

True, but Fedora also already switched to upstart, which provides a similar framework for that dynamic and "cool" system startup.

Personally, I'm not yet convinced that systemd is actually an improvement over upstart, so forcing it through as the new default because it "works pretty well, and is mostly reliable" doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm still waiting for a better explanation of why I should want it.

(Yes, I've read the docs on it. Some of it is looks kinda cool. . . and like a big improvement over the old SysV init. And like a marginal improvement, at best, over upstart, which is more established and significantly better tested. And, as someone who has to use multiple distributions, consistency counts for far more than any of the minor potential improvements. I don't want to have to deal with yet another init system on another distribution.)

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 20:53 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Fedora 14 will introduce numerous package updates, new features, and bug fixes and not a single one of them will have achieved your arbitrary threshold of "the vast majority of Fedora users" asking for it.

Raymond Chen has written a number of thought experiments which are valuable for those who want to understand why their idea is stupid before they propose it. The relevant one here is not "Features do not exist by default" (as you seem to think) but "What if two people did this?"

If you are entitled to a systemd-less Fedora just because not making systemd would have been zero effort, obviously all other Fedora users are also entitled to new versions which lack whatever features they don't happen to want.

But all these extra versions of Fedora require considerable integration and maintenance effort. The project will inevitably collapse if this approach is taken. On the other hand, Fedora is pointless if it each new versions just consists of a few uncontroversial bug fixes against the previous one.

So Fedora has a process to decide which new features land. In those parts of this discussion which aren't taken up with you ironically asking other people to "get a life", it is clear that the process failed, badly.

'distance' is not the correct term here.

Posted Sep 16, 2010 11:23 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

> There is an enormous distance between Fedora and CentOS, much bigger than what was discussed here.

Not ultimately. There are a hundred thousand new ways that Fedora could introduce new functionality that would break stuff for users.

Fedora is one of the last 'happy places' for individual developers and companies that really want to get moving with new technology and have a audience that is willing to test it.

Break something in Mesa, Dbus, GTK, PulseAudio, PHP, Apache, or Nautilus or Packagekit or any of that stuff and you'll piss end users off just as hard as if you broke something in their init scripts. The OS purpose in life is nothing more then to serve the purposes of developers and their applications. End users only care about their applications... whether it's a web forum software or Gimp that is what matters most. If a PHP lib breaks or a init script gets launched out of order the effect is the same for a person that wants to host a website.

There really is no logical dividing point of saying "Well this change might piss of 70% of people so it won't go in, but this change only pisses off 30% of people then it's ok'.

Were is the line you draw?

Logically the line to draw is:
Either you accept changes that you think will probably work or you do not and only accept proven changes!

If somebody has put in the work to design a superior PID 0 from scratch, meets the obligations and goals set forth before him and then still gets all his potential end users denied from him and users are denied the better software... how does that make sense? How is that behavior on the part of the denier justifiable?

It is not, really.

'distance' is not the correct term here.

Posted Sep 16, 2010 11:35 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Oh, and before somebody says something silly like 'init breaking is more serious then gtk breaking!'

Well, it's not. As I explained above the kernel breaking, the drivers sucking, the init sucking, the sound server sucking, the application lib sucking, etc etc. The effect is always going to be the same to the end user:

My application is broke, the OS is shit. The user is DOS'd from their application due to a bug.

And the approach for a end user dealing with the issue the issue is always going to be roughly the same:

1. Hack around the problem.
2. Bitch about it.
3. File a bug report
4. Wait a couple weeks, install a update that fixes the problem.
5. Figure out how to roll back your hacks
6. Bitch some more about it.
7. Gradually forget that it ever happened in the first place.

I know there is different levels of pissed off-ness users will get and I know that there are big differences in the difficulty of working around a broken OS component.. but, frankly, I know I'd have a much easier time dealing with a init script then I would with php_mod or a broken Mesa driver.

So how you approach things is a question of goals. Are changes done with reasonable efforts to assure correctness is acceptable, or are then not and the software must be proven elsewhere first?

That is the difference between CentOS/Rehdat and Fedora.

'distance' is not the correct term here.

Posted Sep 16, 2010 14:06 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Your elaborated and interesting analysis is yet missing one of the most important parameters: time (or speed if you prefer). In this case, six months.

The number of people in this forum that seem to believe a gas pedal has only two positions is truly amazing. Damn, I just made a car analogy. (As an anecdote, I have seen a few people actually using their gas pedal like this).

> and then still gets all his potential end users denied from him [...] How is that behavior on the part of the denier justifiable?

Thanks to this nice formulation above I can finally see the vast ocean of average users eagerly waiting for systemd to be enabled by default (since they are not technical enough to enable it by themselves). They were all hidden by this single guy slowing down the whole process for selfish reasons.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 22:52 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

The fact is that people do care about having shiny new things, really quite a lot.
People care different amounts about different shiny new things. They may care deeply about one set, not at all about a second set, and prefer the tried and true for a third set. But different users have different use cases, which means they disagree about which packages desperately need to be updated to include new features and which should be left alone to promote stability. So there may be just 5% of users who want the latest package for Program X and 5% who want the latest package for Program Y, but they're not necessarily the same 5%.

That means that a give user may wind up using a cutting edge distro even if they'd prefer that most of the software in it remain stable. As long as there are a few packages where they want/need the latest features, it may make sense to go with Fedora over CentOS. It just depends on whether it's harder to get the latest version of their program of interest working on CentOS or to deal with the instability of Fedora.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 21, 2010 10:37 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>If that were anywhere near true then 95% of users would be using something like CentOS

Or Windows

>The fact is that people do care about having shiny new things, really quite a lot.

I guess that explains why Windows has such a tiny share of the market.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 27, 2010 15:57 UTC (Mon) by topher (guest, #2223) [Link]

You're right, people love shiny new features.

However, systemd doesn't qualify in any way for that. People don't *see* systemd unless/until it breaks. Hence, they don't care.

The kind of shiny new features people want, and are willing to run Fedora for, are overwhelmingly in the desktop area, or the rare latest-and-greatest server daemon. 99.9% of them couldn't care less about what software is used to handle init.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 15:04 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

... though for a significant fraction of the 15%, it's more "it works for me, don't fix it" and s{anything new.*}{anything new.}.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 2:54 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (10 responses)

But if you read his message, he isn't complaining that those F14 machines won't be running systemd. He's complaining (and FESCO members are agreeing) that he was told "if you can accomplish this list of things, then Fedora will ship systemd", he worked his butt off to accomplish those things, and then surprise! They changed the rules and didn't even invite him to the meeting where it happened. That's a process perfectly designed to piss off contributors, and bad process is bad process independently of whether it gives a good result.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 3:27 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (6 responses)

If anybody told Lennart that systemd might be in as the default startup mechanism without a trial cycle, shame on them. If Lennart asked for that, shame on him.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 17:22 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (5 responses)

Until now, the process has been pretty open in the Fedora mailing lists. Seems like it should be pretty easy for you to decide who deserves shame. What do you mean by "trial cycle"?

And, you sure you're not presenting a false dichotomy?

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 19:39 UTC (Wed) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link] (4 responses)

I agree with ncm. It's a core component, which is intended to replace something which is not broken, so of course there must be a trial cycle.
Everything else would have been unreasonable, no matter what anybody said or thought before.

It's the right decision, and it feels strange that so many people now feel they have to apologize to Lennart, because his code wasn't chosen to replace a core system component in the next release.

I mean, it's an exceptional honor for the author if his code is chosen, it's the default that that's not the case.

Alex

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 20:30 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (3 responses)

There are two totally distinct issues here:

1) The technical question of whether systemd should go in F14. You think it shouldn't. Sure, that's a reasonable conclusion. (It's worth noting, though, that the Fedora people seem to be in a completely different reality than you -- even now no-one there seems to be saying that core components must have trial cycles as a matter of policy, and if you read the transcript than 4 out of 5 FESCO members voted to use systemd in F14, with 1 unsure.)

2) The social question of how contributors are treated in the process of making the technical decision.

I find it very disheartening how many people here seem to think that only the technical decision is important, and it doesn't matter how many contributors are alienated along the way. (Or if some contributors do feel hurt and alienated, then obviously that's their own problem and they should just suck it up, regardless of how reasonable a response it is.)

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 2:43 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

What of the social question of the level of responsibility upon Lennart for accepting that others, notable and experienced people among them, are trying to do their best for what's right for an entire distro and its users (a lot more people than Lennart) as well as him?

His software is *still* going to be shipped in F14, it will still likely end up the default init at some stage.

Given Lennart's tendency to be quite optimistic about the quality and readyness of his code, I am more than happy to have people besides Lennart make last-minute value judgements as to the ship-default state of his code. I don't think a distro should be held hostage to Lennart's feelings.

NB: You can pretty much substitute "any contributing developer" with "Lennart" in the above comment. So there's some general points being made here.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 4:35 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

Am I being unclear somehow? I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot :-).

No-one's saying that Fedora shouldn't have made the decision it did, no-one's saying that they shouldn't have people besides Lennart making last-minute judgments about shipping his code. (Though if you read that transcript, it may not give you much confidence that they actually made a more informed decision.) And no-one's saying that his feelings should hold anything hostage.

What people are saying -- including the ones who actually made the decision -- is that the process of getting there could have been done in a better way, e.g., by actually deciding and communicating that that was the process they were going to use. They could have gotten to the exact same place without pissing off a very talented (in some ways) contributor, and wouldn't that have been better all around?

I'm sure Lennart will get over it, in the long run it isn't that big a deal. But I'm still astonished at everyone saying "what, nothing happened here, any rational contributor would be happy!"

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 17:09 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Your post seemed to focus on the social issues of treating a contributor badly by rejecting their code on a last-minute value judgement. Mine asked questions about the responsibility the other way around - for the contributing developer to have some understanding that the integration managers have wider responsibilities and to not throw a tantrum when they don't get their way immediately.

Bill Nottingham, I gather, was very well informed on systemd and in particular on the remaining problems. You'll note that the other voters who reversed from yes to no did so because of Bill's no vote, i.e. recognising his standing (both long standing in RedHat, and on systemd status). Bill had also worked with Lennart about required integration issues.

As others have noted (and I repeated in my comment), there is a need for integrators to be able to apply value judgements. It almost certainly is not possible to codify a tightly defined process for integration. I definitely want my distro's integration decision team to have wiggle room.

More importantly, their ability to do this MUST BE RESPECTED. I'm sorry, but emotional black-mail is not what I want to see be an input to the integration decision making process.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 8:19 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> But if you read his message, he isn't complaining that those F14 machines won't be running systemd. He's complaining (and FESCO members are agreeing) that he was told "if you can accomplish this list of things, then Fedora will ship systemd"...

I understand that he is impatient to see the results of his work, but surely having it in Fedora even six months later than he hoped, and firmly on track to become a core component of the heaviest weight Linux distribution is a pretty good compensation prize. Which is at least the impression I get. I would personally forgive people for getting a bit jittery at the last moment about a rather abrupt change of this scale, even if I had been promised it could go in half a year earlier.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 11:59 UTC (Wed) by interalia (subscriber, #26615) [Link]

I haven't read the criteria but I don't believe in objective criteria, in the sense that if certain conditions are met then approval is guaranteed. Truly objective criteria would allow a machine-made decision, but in releasing software I would always make a human judgement call & I suspect most of us feel that way. You're never going to be able to shape the rules to cover every situation, else you get the tangled complexity of legal code.

If anyone gave Lennart an ironclad guarantee that systemd would be released with F14 given certain conditions, then yes shame on them. But I think usually people mean that those are the _minimum_ conditions for consideration and at that point a judgement call will be made.

Perhaps improvements can be made by Fedora to the process but I think it's more realistic to say that (in principle) this judgement call is made for every package and every bug. Most of them are passed semi-automatically, but deep or controversial changes will always invite manual judgement, with a possibility of denial. He's certainly entitled to be disappointed, of course - I know I would be. Being overruled is acceptable as long as you respect the intelligence/judgement of those overruling. (Is that the real problem?)

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 17, 2010 0:35 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

But, AFAIU, F14 will *ship* systemd. It just won't be the default init mechanism.

Not that I really care; I don't use Fedora. I just read this thread for entertainment...

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 3:27 UTC (Wed) by jacktanner (guest, #70122) [Link] (1 responses)

It was perfectly OK for FESCO to come up with new criteria as it was deciding whether to make systemd the default in F14. FESCO is working on a complex problem. How to solve such a problem becomes apparent during the analysis. You cannot have all the criteria determined ahead of time. (But now that you have determined some additional criteria that were important to you, you should record them explicitly so that you can refer to them next time around.)

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 5:08 UTC (Wed) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

It's OK for FESCO to come up with new criteria at the last minute if they can give an objective definition of the new criteria, AND they can present a very solid justification for why the criteria change is necessary. Not just a touchy-feely "I'd be happier if..." justification, but rather something like "the old criteria was inadequate because it overlooked a specific issue that if X happens, Y results."

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 20:04 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Might I say that your response to Lennart in that thread was perhaps the most reasonable one could possibly expect? (I can't find any response from Lennart, which seems very shabby to me. If someone's nice to you you don't ignore them!)

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 15:19 UTC (Thu) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link]

Lennart made his points and stepped out of the thread, see the end of his message.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 5:30 UTC (Wed) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link] (5 responses)

I get what your saying and I understand that he feels upset. But not because process has not been followed. As I understand it having group of experienced people making a judgement call is part of the process and I think that process advocates well for all Fedora users.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 5:47 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

FESCo is a group of voted members. They are not necessarily experienced. The majority of people who voted for them trusted them to make the right decisions nevertheless. The process failure is not that. It is a mismanagement of expectations. If I am proposing a feature, I would like to know in more concrete terms what it would take to be accepted rather than fuzzy feelings. FESCo members have explicitly acknowledged that the process needs some adjustments for critical features.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 9:55 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (3 responses)

I do think it's impossible to create concrete terms beforehand for everything, it would not be flexible enough for the real world. There's a need for room for fuzzy feelings.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 11:03 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Yep but FESCo themselves have acknowledged the need to do better. QA team in Fedora for example has continuously revises the release criteria when they come across bugs that must be blockers but don't meet the defined criteria yet. The feature process also could use such changes and systemd has shown a need for it.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 15:08 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

So they could have said "Okay, Lennart, the final decision on systemd is going to be a judgment call made by FESCO at this meeting on this date." You can make concrete statements about your fuzzy decisions. They didn't even do that.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 10:28 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

While they didn't specify a date earlier, when the initial decision was made, FESCo did explicitly mention that it was a decision for alpha release and will have to make the final decision at a later point.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 13:16 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

Just because he followed the rules does not mean he's entitled to approval.

It's like speed limits: if you're over the limit, you're clearly in the wrong, but if you always ride at speed limit minus one mph, ignoring road curves, weather, other traffic, things are not going to end well.

And that's not because the limits are faulty, that's because you didn't use your common sense to evaluate the gray area between "absolutely wrong" and "appropriate to the current situation".

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 16:35 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

A car analogy? That sounds like fun!

A month or two ago some policemen had told Lennart, a well-known local driver, that it was probably OK for him to drive on Highway F14. Time was short so Lennart started immediately. He kept his speed under the speed limit, anticipated curves, weather, etc, and even wrote about driving safety on his blog.

A few days ago, however, the police voted on it. Nobody thought to invite Lennart (he was driving anyway). Severely understaffed and cranky from dealing with all the other inmates, the few policemen present decided that Highway F14 is actually a fairly perilous road, covered in fog and winding along a cliff above a penguin sanctuary. They agreed that Lennart was a good driver, one of the best on the road, but he does have one accident on his record and his SystemD sports car has had some recalls. For everybody's safety, they decided they would throw him in jail.

It's no problem, they argued, Lennart would be a stoic inmate. He can work from his cell improving the tires and brakes on his car so that, when he's paroled in six months, he can continue driving. This time he would most likely reach his destination.

Lennart yelled and banged his tin cup on the bars claiming he was wrongly imprisoned, and that if it was illegal to drive on the road anyway then they should have just put up a barrier. Why let him waste all that gas? He started a letter-writing campaign, to no avail. A few penguins, feathers still smoldering from Lennart's previous crash, cheered at his misfortune. Everyone else looked forward to watching him attempt Highway F15.

Lennart sat in his cell and quietly plotted his revenge...

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 21:22 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

While I think you might just have stretched the car analogies past breaking point ;) I have to say that this got a chuckle from me.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 13:56 UTC (Wed) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link] (37 responses)

Was this comment really necessary?

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 15:18 UTC (Wed) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link] (36 responses)

> Was this comment really necessary?

I've found Lennart's behavior towards volunteers and others to be abhorrent. So yes, I did feel this comment was necessary.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 15:29 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (35 responses)

How do you feel about your behaviour? Is it excellent?

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 15:47 UTC (Wed) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link] (34 responses)

> How do you feel about your behaviour? Is it excellent?

By clarifying a misconception quoted in the post that Lennart could remain stoic, I feel my behaviour is fine. Pointing out the reality of a poisonous person is important. Especially when he reacts so poorly to an elected body consisting of volunteers and professionals. It's not OK for him to behave like that.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 19:22 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think anything is wrong with giving a link to the way Lennart thinks.

I don't believe this was handled very well.

That said, I hope I misunderstand, but do you really suggest Lennart is a poisonous person? Plus suggest he had to ok with the way this was handled? I don't see how you could think that, so I hope I'm mistaken.

I think this should have been handled totally differently (and I mean with the same decision).

Anyway, I'm pretty appalled by the way Lennart is treated in general.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 20:32 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite so. There are a good few poisonous people in the free software community and tangential regions, some of whom are so poisonous that they kill any other participation in any projects they get involved in (some of whom are so poisonous they got banned from the Debian BTS, no less, which takes *skill*).

Lennart may take things for granted and have somewhat iffy opinions regarding portability and stability and be rather... forthright (and all the rest of us are such shrinking violets), but he certainly isn't poisonous by any means. He's a hell of a long way from poisonous.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 19:49 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (31 responses)

It is not ok for you to call people poisonous without sufficient justification. I have every right to oppose FESCo or disagree with their position if I feel their decision or the way they took their decision is not right. Would you call me poisonous if I choose to exercise that right even if FESCo members have agreed explicitly and apologized for the process gaps? Your outburst don't appear to put you in a position of righteousness here.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 0:06 UTC (Thu) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link] (30 responses)

> It is not ok for you to call people poisonous without sufficient justification.

He dismissed my concerns multiple times, talked down to volunteers, bent the truth on multiple occasions in a private thread he and I had to the point where I decided not to participate in systemd at all (You'll notice my almost complete silence on the subject recently). When I told him about all the problems I had, he actually tried to convince me I wasn't having problems then he dismissed me because I had produced no bug reports (because searching through bug reports showed my problems had been fixed or had work-arounds). Then further discounted even the idea that I had problems simply because I had not CC'd myself on any bugs (because they'd been fixed). He's POISON.

When confronted about the slower boot times (which was a claimed feature) I was dismissed. When I asked, multiple times, who was asking for this feature. He deflected every time saying google knows the answer if only I'd google for it. In reality, he just wanted to duplicate features from systems already in place in other OS's. Which is perfectly fine, had he just said that. Instead wanted to argue and be deceptive about the fact that NO ONE was actually requesting this feature, it's in his poisonous nature.

If you want to argue with me about what _my_ opinion is. Good luck. If you're just calling me out because you think I'm being unreasonable, read my experiences with Lennart above. But be extra clear about one thing Rahul, I'm not the one trying to cram major changes in last minute of an alpha then getting all pissy about it when it gets removed in the beta.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 0:38 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (7 responses)

*I* want systemd. Everything I read about it makes me think "Wow, that's so obviously the right thing to do, why wasn't it already being done that way? And when can I start using it?" I'm sure I'm not the only one. I'm very excited about getting a system management daemon which actually has useful features, instead of the abortion which is rc.d/init.d.

Of course, since I don't use Fedora on any of my systems right now, whether it's in or out of F14 doesn't have any immediate effect on me, but I hope systemd will become ubiquitous on Linux distributions within the next couple years, and am happily looking forward to that future.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 3:29 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (4 responses)

> "Wow, that's so obviously the right thing to do, why wasn't it already being done that way? And when can I start using it?"

I guess Lennart's paper explains that by mentioning various services and facilities systemd uses, that exist these days in modern kernels and distros, which may not have existed when rc.d/init.d system was devised.

Anyhow, systemd (as explained in the paper) does look like a very nice way to go. It was heavily influenced by launchd from Apple, but is utilising Linux specific things. And, if Apple could make a transition to launchd, I don't see why Linux distros couldn't transition to systemd.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 9:31 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] (3 responses)

And, if Apple could make a transition to launchd, I don't see why Linux distros couldn't transition to systemd.

Because Apple controls all its own components.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 10:11 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

Oh, come on. Systemd can launch sysv stuff today. So, there is no reason panic.

And because everything in Fedora is open source, there is no reason to believe that in the future various software packages cannot be adjusted to have a native systemd init.

I think Red Hat have demonstrated by now that when they need something, they will work hard to get it. And the beauty of it is that we all benefit, because they always do open source.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 10:59 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] (1 responses)

If systemd becomes a standard, it seems likely that many projects will adopt it as such. But we are not there yet, and if it were as simple as you are suggesting, systemd would probably not exist.

What I was saying is that Apple defines its own standard: they don't have to care at all about its adoption. It helps that technically speaking, it is a lot easier to test only a limited amount of hardware and software components.

But I'm sure that if systemd fails to get adopted it won't be for technical reasons, although I think people tend to brush over issues that are not relevant on your single desktop, smartphone or server, but quite important when you have to manage a large number of them. So I'm not sure that if systemd does become the standard, it will be for technical reasons. Whether RHEL will get systemd any time soon, I don't know. I can't think of many reasons for it.

(Did you know that launchd is Open Source, by the way?)

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 17, 2010 0:20 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Whether RHEL will get systemd any time soon, I don't know. I can't think of many reasons for it.

If the thing ends up being default in Fedora and it proves useful, then we may see it in RHEL 7, I would say. So, about 5 years from now at the earliest :-)

> (Did you know that launchd is Open Source, by the way?)

Yes. And watched that Apple presentation about it.

Lennart explained why he felt the need to "reinvent" the whole thing in his paper: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 14:37 UTC (Thu) by Lovechild (guest, #3592) [Link]

Hell, I want Systemd and I'm not even part of Fedora anymore.

The approach seems well reasoned and like the obviously right thing to do. Lennart is an excellent developer (though he does have certain communication issues and at least in the past disliked bug trackers with a fiery passion), I believe he is capable of pulling this off. He showed that much investing time not just in solving the release blocker bugs before the deadline but in blogging and talking about the new approach to let everyone know what it entails and what it does not.

Fedora really mishandled this one and they should be ashamed, if blocker bugs and their handling isn't the way to determine a technology's readiness as well as it's developers ability to meet demand.. what is?

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 27, 2010 16:24 UTC (Mon) by topher (guest, #2223) [Link]

Yeah, it'd be great to get rid of that aging init system. . . oh, wait, Fedora already did. It's currently shipping upstart as the default init system, which is a modern, dynamic system with a lot of potential.

People seem to forget that systemd is attempting to replace a modern init replacement, not the ancient init. That's already been done.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 10:43 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes. I do think you are being unreasonable and your approach is not helpful at all. Calling someone poisonous because they disagreed with FESCo is flimsy justification. I can't judge anything based on private threads but the public display is certainly confrontational from both sides and I see no value out of that. You apologized once in the fedora devel list for this and the same approach continues here. I think whatever personal animosity you share is getting out of hand and you need to drop it and move on.

If the Fedora process allows one to push changes more than is reasonable, it is a failure that needs to be addressed at the project level. Trying to tackle the problem piecemeal certainly won't work as has been evident already and is being worked on by FESCo.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 13:12 UTC (Thu) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link] (1 responses)

And just how are you helping Rahul? You bring the ass out of me every time you open your mouth. What exactly where you expecting?

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 13:17 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I am hoping that in the process of being critical about others, you are willing to engage in course correction yourself. I will leave it at that.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 12:23 UTC (Thu) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (18 responses)

> When I told him about all the problems I had, he actually tried to convince me I wasn't having problems then he dismissed me because I had produced no bug reports (because searching through bug reports showed my problems had been fixed or had work-arounds).

So what did you actually expect?
"I have problems"
"OK fine did you file bugs?"
"No those are already filed/fixed."
Not sure what I would do here ... reporting known issues even though you know that thus are already fixed isn't any helpful. You might have added a "me too" comment to the bugs that where still open but I don't see how this justify calling someone poisonous.

> When confronted about the slower boot times (which was a claimed feature) I was dismissed.

"Dismissed" ? By being told that without readahead there are no gains on rotating media if any.

> Instead wanted to argue and be deceptive about the fact that NO ONE was actually requesting this feature, it's in his poisonous nature.

Well at least one person wanted those features otherwise they wouldn't have been written. Since when is it a problem to add a feature only because no user requested it? Sorry but that does not make sense. When writing software I do add the features that *I* think are useful I don't wait until others request them.

IMO you are overreacting a bit calm down.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 14:43 UTC (Thu) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link] (17 responses)

> "Dismissed" ? By being told that without readahead there are no gains on rotating media if any.

No, by being told he wished people wouldn't focus on that even though they're listing it as a feature. And AFAIK to date it's still not "no gains" it's "slower boot time".

>Well at least one person wanted those features otherwise they wouldn't have been written. Since when is it a problem to add a feature only because no user requested it? Sorry but that does not make sense. When writing software I do add the features that *I* think are useful I don't wait until others request them.

The problem is what you've described there has become the norm. When developers develop for developers, it's wrong. I'm sorry but it just is. Developers are not their own reason for existence. If they'd take the time to listen to users. Get requirements, etc. The Linux desktop would be in so much better shape then it is. Instead, we're sitting at roughly 1% adoption over the last 10 YEARS, and for some reason we all think that's some big success. We, quite literally, can't give this stuff away. Meanwhile, the server side of things has been great.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 15:45 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Users (even highly technical users who should be able to get this kind of thing right) seem to generally not excel at stating what they actually want.

FOSS projects, for various reasons of varying obviousness (starting with "being a FOSS developer has a rather less stringent and less conventional requirement in terms of social skills" and "developers who've spent any time in industry tend to regard 'marketing' people with a mixture of contempt and cynicism" - which tragically is often justified by the conduct of corporate marketing staff), seems likely to not have many of the kind of people who excel at getting users to express their actual requirements.

So, to get an excellent Linux desktop fit for Joe User, the FOSS world needs to (a) find those kinds of people (b) find the funding to pay for their services.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 18:35 UTC (Thu) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (15 responses)

> No, by being told he wished people wouldn't focus on that even though they're listing it as a feature.

That isn't really that wrong (to focus on correctness over speed in a new project).

> And AFAIK to date it's still not "no gains" it's "slower boot time".

Yeah parallel startup pretty much ends in disk seek madness so I am not surprised. Readahead is supposed to fix that according to Lennart but I have not tested that so I can't really comment.

> The problem is what you've described there has become the norm. When developers develop for developers, it's wrong. I'm sorry but it just is.

I didn't say one should not listen to users what I said was a user request is not a prerequisite for adding a feature like you made it sound.

> Instead, we're sitting at roughly 1% adoption over the last 10 YEARS [..]

That is not caused by one issue but a couple of them. The resistance to changes is one of them. You can not go forward and at the same time not want to change anything because "it has been like that for N years". (Not directed at you but IMO this is one of the top reasons why we are 'stuck').

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 17, 2010 13:22 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (5 responses)

> > Instead, we [Linux] are sitting at roughly 1% adoption over the last 10 YEARS [..]

> That is not caused by one issue but a couple of them. The resistance to changes is one of them.

The pace of changes is definitely one of the reason Linux does not succeed on the desktop. Users are bad at drafting requirements, but desktop users are very good at saying "I just want my apps to run". Desktop users could not care less about the operating system and systemd. Well, guess what dear desktop user, your dirty, closed source yet beloved app was running on Linux yesterday but is not working any more:

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/guide-to-sound-apis.html
> "PulseAudio supports the safe *subset* of ALSA"

Now compare with this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
> The testers reported this bug to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added [in Windows!!] special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

Read the rest of Joel's page and you might start seeing the difference between a technical success and a market success, between designing for developers and designing for users.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 17, 2010 15:18 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (4 responses)

You suggest that if we slowed down the rate of change, that if we'd stayed closer to Red Hat 6.2 for the last decade, the Linux Desktop would have seen more adoption??? That's laughable.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 17, 2010 16:07 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

You suggest that preserving backward compatibility prevented Microsoft from implementing new versions of Windows? That's laughable.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 17, 2010 22:37 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Obviously that's not what I suggest.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 21, 2010 10:53 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>You suggest that if we slowed down the rate of change, that if we'd stayed closer to Red Hat 6.2 for the last decade, the Linux Desktop would have seen more adoption?

This seems so obviously the case that I'm flabbergasted anyone would argue against it. The majority of people are so opposed to change that they don't even install critical Windows updates that solve security bugs with no user-visible changes.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 21, 2010 12:57 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Actually RedHat 6.2 worked better on the hardware I had 10 years ago then the Fedora 12 I tested last winter on my current hardware. The X server worked fine, I could watch TV using xawtv, I could play MP3 files and the installer didn't f*cked up the Windows partition. With Fedora 12 the tv watching applications didn't work, the GUI had problems (don't get me started on pulseaudio) - and when I had to reinstall Windows, I didn't bother to keep a partition for Linux.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 17, 2010 17:04 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (8 responses)

> Instead, we're sitting at roughly 1% adoption over the last 10 YEARS [..]

That is not caused by one issue but a couple of them. The resistance to changes is one of them. You can not go forward and at the same time not want to change anything

Except with the Linux stack, all too often the "forward" change is intended to satisfy some small number of developers and not the users. I.e. some subsystem gets rewritten to make its structure/working more aesthetically appealing to the developers who work on it - often this results in the end-users left to cope with large numbers of regressions for an extended period after the rewrite.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 18, 2010 10:48 UTC (Sat) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (7 responses)

> Except with the Linux stack, all too often the "forward" change is intended to satisfy some small number of developers and not the users. I.e. some subsystem gets rewritten to make its structure/working more aesthetically appealing to the developers who work on it - often this results in the end-users left to cope with large numbers of regressions for an extended period after the rewrite.

That is not true at all. The only problem is that (power) users that are used to the "the way it has been for N years" (tm) are frustrated that they have to adapt to changes.

As people always seem to refer to pulse in this context, lets use it as an example.
Compare the audio stack with pure ALSA (+/- dmix) with what windows and OSX offer. To be blunt its a *joke* ... now add pulseaudio to the mix and the gap is narrowed by a large margin.

Of course some apps needed to be updated to work well with the new audio stack as well as bugs in pulseaudio itself needed to be fixed.

Do the same for other changes like NetworkManager (especially on laptops) and you will come to the same conclusion.

BUT such changes have to have to be done in order to be relevant in the desktop market.

Obviously the current Linux desktop isn't good enough to take any relevant marked share so it needs to change because apparently "the way it has always been" wasn't the right one or isn't anymore. What was a good design 20 years ago must not necessarily be one *today* ... technology advances ... the market changes ... computers are now used by everyone not only by "geeks".

Even MS and Apple face the same problems from time to time (like the 9x -> NT(2000, XP) move or the introduction of OSX). But both where obviously the right decision moving forward.

You cannot stagnate and at the same time want to move forward. If you are a car manufacturer and build the same car as the one you where building 20 years ago because "it worked fine back then, why change it , ..." you are pretty much guaranteed to go out of business.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 18, 2010 14:31 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Let's have some more examples, these are the just ones that bit me the most, recentlyish, that I can remember (I'm sure other readers can add more):

* GNOME session: session management rewritten, support for long-standing SM protocols dropped completely - even most GNOME apps didn't support the new protocol. When support for the old protocol was eventually added back, it was buggy and couldn't even reliably read its own state files without crashing (leading to your desktop resetting back to the xDM within seconds of login starting).

* GNOME GDM: major rewrite broke support for the GUI config tool, and dropped support for many previous configuration options (and not just legacy XDMCP). I didn't notice any functional benefits to this rewrite.

* Intel Xorg driver: It's had some major periods of instability in its time, at least one of which (around F10 time iirc) was due to some kind of internal rewrite. Lots of X server hangs/lockups for lots of people, lasting the primary-release-span of at least one Fedora release (F10 iirc).

* GNOME VFS rewrite broke some stuff initially in a release, though it seems it hurt more on Ubuntu, due to release timing, than Fedora. Got fixed reasonably quickly though.

As for PA, it's also been a major source of regressions. The ones I've noticed most have been volume related (flat volume bugs; GNOME volume control getting broken; lots of applications having their volume control broken in the switch over to PA; awful distortion problems due to bugs in the mixer code). These have all taken quite a few Fedora release cycles to thrash out. Granted, PA adds lots of new features - particularly related to transparent rerouting of sound - though my use of those new features is very rare compared to my "use" of all the bugs.

Apparently some of the flat-volume bugs are due to the world underneath PA not quite as perfect as it would like. While that may be the case, it'd be nice if the sane operation of something as elementary as the main volume control on Linux desktop generally did not depend so heavily on all hardware being perfect, and additionally all drivers for that hardware being near perfect. That just seems a triumph of naive optimism over engineering practicality to me, but hey, who cares... Additionally, PA deliberately doesn't care too much about backward compatibility with ALSA app API - that can be pretty annoying if you use an affected app.

The worst part of this is all the rewriting gets done *independently*, and hence at different times. Rather than focusing the rewrites to happen together and target the same point in time, we instead are in the situation where *every* new release of desktop-orientated distros contain major rewrites of some other sub-system and hence, inevitably, major regressions. Hence the system is *never* converging on stability.

Now, somewhat luckily, RHEL6 is due out soon and that should do me for a couple of years, and might perhaps offer more stability. However, generally, the Linux enterprise distros release cycles are decadal and hence not well suited for desktop use in the long-run - because Linux app development inevitably targets the bleeding edge.

So what are Linux desktop users to do exactly? The choice appears to be between a desktop that will on average be 5 years out of date and generally useless for new desktop, or a bleeding edge desktop that is broken in different ways every 6 months (and which you can't get support on)[1].

What should those users, those who have not yet or do not want to switch to OS-X at least, do exactly?

1. My direct experience is with Fedora and RedHat, but it doesn't seem like Canonical's Ubuntu releases are much different, between LTS and the bleeding edge.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 19, 2010 13:19 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

As far as I can tell, the answer is 'it will all be perfect after *this* major rewrite'. This is *exactly* the same argument that the central planners in the 1950s Soviet Union used ('it will all be perfect after we have finished optimizing the economy properly'), and it's likely to fail for pretty much the same reasons (something *else* now unanticipated will turn up and necessitate another major rewrite, and so ad infinitum). Basically it is overoptimistic.

Now an optimistic environment is *much* nicer to hack in than a pessimistic one, and it certainly develops faster, but I'm not sure it's better for the users. I think RH have the right idea here: fork off a pessimistic, slow-changing environment from the optimistic one periodically, and let the users use *that* instead. (This was, unfortunately, not an option available to the economic planners in the Soviet Union, but software is more copyable than economies.)

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 18, 2010 15:15 UTC (Sat) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link] (3 responses)

Here's my take on this (I've blogged as such)

1) Linux has been very successful on servers
2) Linux is starting to be successful on handhelds.
3) Linux has absolutely flat-lined on desktops and we can't win there with a marginally better desktop.
4) People are using more handhelds and devices for their works and there is a major shift to cloud computing and software provided by the likes of Google.

Given that, I think that in just a few years (3-5?) we'll look back and wonder what on earth were we thinking working towards 3? Especially when it takes us further away from 1) which is where our major success has happened.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 18, 2010 15:25 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

The lesson from the 90s is that if you cede the desktop to a monopoly player, they can then leverage their control of client software to put pressure on the server side.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 18, 2010 22:36 UTC (Sat) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (1 responses)

The lesson from the 2000s is that you need the occasional high-profile desktop Linux "sacrificial lamb" to make MSFT play nice. If you look at the shift of negotiating power, desktop Linux is a market share fail but a win for all the other players in the market.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 19, 2010 7:58 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

True.

Another reason not to cede the desktop is that familiarity is a major criteria for selecting server systems, and desktop usage is a prime way to acquire familiarity.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 18, 2010 18:16 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> Do the same for other changes like NetworkManager (especially on laptops) and you will come to the same conclusion.

Just for the record, the migration to NetworkManager has been extremely smooth for a number of reasons:
- NetworkManager replaced very little of an "API". I mean, there was not much legacy to support; there were not that many 3rd-party applications messing with sysconfig-network (or equivalent). Most applications just want network connectivity period.
- NetworkManager made an incomplete but significant effort to support previous configuration files.
- At all times and still today, it was/is possible not to use NetworkManager and revert to the previous tools.
- It is even possible to make this choice on a per-interface basis.


Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 6:56 UTC (Wed) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link] (1 responses)

Sad for Lennart, however a good move for people running Fedora. I have a feeling the later group is some what larger.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 8:16 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

That is a pretty poor argument to make. They could still have made their decision clearer, still rejected it and have avoided annoying Lennart.

Furthermore, 'feeling the later group is larger'. Nice attempt at sarcasm. Just because you do not like Lennart/systemd/still want to discuss Pulseaudio doesn't mean you should not behave professionally.

Fedora has issues

Posted Sep 15, 2010 8:55 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (9 responses)

I read that whole log and it seems very clear to me that they were sufficiently undecided so that IF Lennart had been given the chance to take part in the discussion then F14 would ship with systemd.

There is just no excuse for such a behavior in a (allegedly) open project. If *I* were in Lennarts shoes and the main reason my project was rejected because I was stoic enough to cope then I would certainly be looking for a different distro to contribute too (most certainly and in a second)

Fedora is just lucky that Red Hat is paying Lennart enough to deal with shit like that, volunteer contributors would just walk away and never come back.

Fedora has issues

Posted Sep 15, 2010 12:37 UTC (Wed) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link] (8 responses)

Has he been treated that badly? Many projects suffer a much worse fate, just follow kernel development. Yet they mostly don't have a dummy spit. If you get 10 people in a room you will get 11 different opinions, that normal. And that's what makes open source so good. So learn to work with it or you'll have a very unhappy life.

Fedora has issues

Posted Sep 15, 2010 14:39 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (4 responses)

Linus is a dictator and has never made any secret of that. If you ask "How do I get this into Linux" and someone tells you there's a documented process that works every time, they're pulling your leg.

Fedora notionally has such a process. Every iteration some features get baked in that somebody doesn't like or doesn't think are finished. If they got selected (systemd did) they land in the alpha tests (yep) and then if they're able to fix the inevitable bug reports (again yep) they are kept in through beta and into release (not this time).

I'd have been completely happy to see FESCO push systemd out if it wasn't working well enough. Or if Lennart had proved unresponsive. But what happens, if you read the transcript, is a disorganised mess. People elected to do a job aren't there, those who are there haven't read any background material, they end up making a decision based on the gut feeling of just one or two people, on matters that were never previously mentioned to Lennart. It's a car crash.

The most serious underlying problem is this: Fedora barely has enough resources, yet people really want two different distributions, one that has all the latest exciting development, and one that never gives them any trouble. That's _at least_ twice as much work, with no sign of the necessary skilled volunteers to make it happen.

Fedora has issues

Posted Sep 15, 2010 17:33 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

> what happens, if you read the transcript, is a disorganised mess. People elected to do a job aren't there, those who are there haven't read any background material, they end up making a decision based on the gut feeling of just one or two people, on matters that were never previously mentioned to Lennart.

Excellent summary!

Fedora has issues

Posted Sep 15, 2010 19:38 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> yet people really want two different distributions, one that has all the latest exciting development, and one that never gives them any trouble.

Hearing this again and again (or "just use RedHat") starts to become a bit annoying. Development and testing speed is not limited to just two values "fastest" and "slowest".

Fedora has issues

Posted Sep 16, 2010 8:41 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Up-to-date, volunteer-maintained, stable. Pick two.

Fedora has issues

Posted Sep 16, 2010 13:31 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

>> If you ask "How do I get this into Linux" and someone tells you there's a documented process that works every time, they're pulling your leg. <<

While I agree that Linux's development is too disorganized, you have a strange way to describe it: some features are bad ideas, so they shouldn't be in the kernel i.e. not taking every contribution is a *good thing*!

As for the rest, I agree..

Fedora has issues

Posted Sep 15, 2010 14:52 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (1 responses)

Linux = An apple
Fedora = An orange pimped up robot donkey with rocket boosters that is supposed to transform into a pink fluffy unicorn that spreads fairy dust, but that isn't working yet for anybody

Good luck comparing those two.

Fedora has issues

Posted Sep 16, 2010 1:33 UTC (Thu) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link]

Just comparing people interacting with people. It's the same everywhere and it's something everyone has to learn to do.

Fedora has issues

Posted Sep 15, 2010 19:36 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Many projects suffer a much worse fate

What does it matter what other projects do? I want to strive to treating people well. E.g. by following http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct. Won't always be followed perfectly, but the point is to strive to threat people well.

Within free software/open source there are a lot of opinions, yes. But people actually making decisions (doing the work) should strive to be better. Even within the kernel, the aim is to have the best implementation/idea. So what matters is the right solution, not simple words. Though I still think it is too aggressive, at least decisions seem to be influenced by people who actually code, instead of people who appear to have a lot of time to talk (which is fine, but sometimes results in discussions going offtopic, steered in one way, etc). For the latter I'm not talking about Fedora, I don't follow it closely enough, though I do read their mailing lists for fun.

For an example of how the GNOME release-team handles things I'll quote the 'mission statement' as found on http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning:

The GNOME Release Team helps to coordinate the GNOME release process, mainly by creating a 6-monthly release schedule, and keeping everyone informed about the various stages of that schedule. We work for the developer community, helping everyone to work together and make progress. We try not to get in the way.

I think above is pretty clear and reflects reality

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 15:55 UTC (Wed) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link] (3 responses)

I really feel for Lennart here.

But it's good to get some insight into how Fedora works. I for one would not consider contributing to it as a result of this display.

I wonder how Lennart would be able to continue to. If I were him I would be looking for another distro to apply my talents to.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 10:29 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

What display are you referring to exactly? Lennart works for Red Hat. What other distro would be contributing to?

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 15:04 UTC (Thu) by Lovechild (guest, #3592) [Link] (1 responses)

Time to look for a new job as well perhaps, a surprising amount of places are looking for developers with Pulseaudio experience. I would be surprised if Lennart couldn't pick up and leave if he wanted with little consequence to his employment or paycheck status long term.

Nokia e.g. is advertising such a position right now:
http://nokia.taleo.net/careersection/10120/jobdetail.ftl?...

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 16:06 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

FESCo tentatively approved a feature and explicitly reserved judgement about the final decision and while I can understand some annoyance due to not getting the feature in, I doubt this has any serious effect a few months down the line. Everyone just needs to take a deep breath.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 17:16 UTC (Wed) by nirik (subscriber, #71) [Link] (3 responses)

My take on things (I'm nirik in the meeting):

http://scrye.com/wordpress-mu/nirik/2010/09/15/fesco-feat...

Summary: Process needs improvement. Communication needs improvement. Not the end of the world. We will be releasing F15 with a nice solid init system. Feel free to help test and improve it before then.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 17:52 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

> We will be releasing F15 with a nice solid init system

I'm sure that's true but are you talking about systemd? Between this statement, and the final sentence of your blog post, one could come away with the impression that you're saying that systemd will be a part of F15.

Just trying to keep language clearer so the chances of something like this happening again are smaller. Thanks for posting your thoughts, very helpful!

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 15, 2010 18:44 UTC (Wed) by nirik (subscriber, #71) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, I was talking about systemd there.

Given how close it was this time to ready, I think it should be in good shape for f15.

Of course anything can happen over the next 6 months. We will see.

Fedora defers systemd to F15

Posted Sep 16, 2010 13:48 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Lennart did a wonderful job here. Even if postponing systemd seems right to me, it's quite an achievement to have raised it to such a level in such a short time.

erring on the side of indecisiveness

Posted Sep 16, 2010 17:10 UTC (Thu) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link]

Looking at the agenda: no one expected to reject systemd at this point. This explains why there wasn't much voting activity on the tickets, 5 out of 9 FESCo members were present (and one had left before the final tally), and Lennart wasn't invited. If systemd had been less successful closing bugs and doing test days, I'm sure the meeting would have attracted more interest.

Looking at the IRC transcript (20:12:29 – 20:12:49): Bill Nottingham's feeling of uncertainty was key. The tally was at +4 in favour, with one person left to vote. notting's “not a full -1” changed the minds of mjg59 and SMParrish. No one established a clear case for rejection, but acceptance became uncomfortable and rejection a safe default.

notting's concerns were: the fedora deployment guide chapter wasn't ready; chkconfig/s-c-services needed to be updated so that it would enable/disable systemd-native services. Those don't seem hard to address, but might have escaped notice because they weren't directly under the systemd team's purvey. However, his description was more emphatic: “gaping holes in the plan”, “assuming it's feasible”.

Given how much gut feeling and how little actual evidence were involved in the discussion, I think the only thing that should have been postponed was the decision to postpone this feature.


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