LWN: Comments on "Episodes from the evolution of Fedora"

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

brouhaha — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:53:58 +0000

And after 17 months, including Summer of Code 2007 and 2008, there still isn't a release of either Zope 2 or Zope 3 that works with Python 2.5. :-(

I know, it's open source so if I don't like it I should fix it myself rather than complaining. But life's too short, so my solution was to stop using Zope.

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

abans — Sun, 27 May 2007 06:46:39 +0000

I use last development kernel (2.6.21-1.3149.fc7), have this such problem too.

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

k8to — Tue, 22 May 2007 17:27:14 +0000

*shrug*, I read the text as a description of a philosophy, that of resolving all important issues prior to ship. As a Debian user I certainly appreciate that.

The problem, to my mind, isn't so much the slow cycles but the stale software in the slow cycles. Maybe that's just a symptom. Testing still doesn't run on my now 10 month old hardware. Luckily I am empowered to address this problem myself.

No, Python2 was delayed due to GPL-incompatibility problems.

k8to — Tue, 22 May 2007 17:24:05 +0000

Python2's introduction was delayed long after these concerns were resolved. The "problem" window persisted for six months or so, but Red Hat shipped out of date pythons for 3-4 years.

It was anaconda, and the principle anaconda developer having departed.

maybe but...

gvy — Thu, 17 May 2007 22:26:11 +0000

IIRC they couldn't get Anaconda that easy onto 2.x too.

Why is Zope a big deal?

fyodor — Sat, 12 May 2007 00:36:35 +0000

Hear! Hear! I run Fedora on my 3 most important machines, and I'm also glad to see these changes. I don't want Fedora to go overboard with experimental code which might destabilize my system, but the Nouveau (off by default) and Python 2.5 changes seem eminently reasonable.

-Fyodor

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

joey — Fri, 11 May 2007 20:36:40 +0000

Weird comment about Debian in this article. After all, Debian didn't delay any release waiting for everything to work with one version of python; it instead packages multiple co-existing versions and allows holdouts that don't work with the newest version to run using an older version. There's was a lot of infrastructure work done by Debian (and Ubuntu) developers to support this.

Kind of a shame that LWN tends to fall back to the old standby of ragging on Debian's release cycle when it could instead just discuss how Debian has already solved the problem.

Otherwise interesting article.

No, Python2 was delayed due to GPL-incompatibility problems.

dwheeler — Fri, 11 May 2007 02:16:27 +0000

No, I think Python 2's introduction was delayed because of GPL-incompatibility concerns. <a href="http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2001-February...">
Here's a sample post of discussions about Python 2 licensing</a>
(not specific to Red Hat in this case, but you can see that it WAS an issue.

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

jengelh — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:50:05 +0000

I was implying 10.3alpha. libata is only seriously used for SATA in 10.2.

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

vlima — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:36:51 +0000

The install cd for opensuse 10.2 uses the old ide driver on my laptop.
Iow. they're cheating. :)

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

tseaver — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:25:19 +0000

I'll note as well that there is a Google Summer of Code project this year
aimed at getting Zope to work with Python 2.5, so this problem is likely
short-lived.

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

tseaver — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:23:10 +0000

The fact that Zope can't be run after compiling with Python 2.5 is
due to a combination of factors, some of which are easier to work around
than others:

- APIs have been removed in Python 2.5, often without any kind of
deprecation process (the 'OverflowWarning' exception type, for
instance, is just gone in 2.5, yet using it produced no warnings at
all under 2.4).

Those issues are mostly minor, and might even be in the purview of a
package maintainer to patch away (if they were the whole problem, then
Zope itself would have already added the forward-compatibility).

Some issues, however, are likely too hard to fix as a package maintainer:

- The underlying API for C-based extension types now asserts on
Zope's ExtensionClass, which is noted in the module headers as the
original inspiration for the abstract object stuff in Python. Again,
there is absolutely no clue when building / running Zope under Python
2.4 that anything will break.

- The implications of Python's new AST-based compiler for Zope's
"untrusted code" security model are unknown. Evaluating them
requires fairly deep knowledge of the Python internals *and* a
willingness to think hard about how they might be exploited by
malicious (or wrong-headed) code in templates and through-the-web
scripts.

This last issue is the one that the Zope community had expected to be
the problem; the unintended backward-compatibility issues are just icing
on the cake.

Why is Zope a big deal?

jospoortvliet — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:00:25 +0000

I applaud fedora (and Red Hat) for their effort to propell the development
of FOSS. There are risks, but I think the good effects surpass the risks.
Imho it was a good choice to include the new driver and python etc...

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

JoeBuck — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:40:23 +0000

But does SUSE work on vlima's system? The problem seems to affect his particular CDROM device, but not others.

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

jengelh — Thu, 10 May 2007 14:15:12 +0000

While SUSE has success with libata... go figure.

Fedora is a development distribution

mattdm — Thu, 10 May 2007 12:10:59 +0000

The whole purpose of Fedora is to test/debug/... packages that are destined to end up in the RedHat distro.

Not quite true. That's only one part of Fedora's purpose (even from Red Hat's point of view).

Fedora is a development distribution

addw — Thu, 10 May 2007 07:43:07 +0000

The whole purpose of Fedora is to test/debug/... packages that are destined to end up in the RedHat distro. It is done in public and with the lable ''distribution'' to encourage people to use/test it in a wide variety of situations/hardware, etc.

So plone is broken, well it will get fixed eventually and python_2.5/phone combination will be fit to use in RedHat 6 (or whatever). This is as it should be.

I never cease to be amazed at the people who run serious production servers on Fedora. Why do this ? We all know that Fedora is leading edge and that things break occasionally; we also know that Fedora is not really maintained for many years.

If you want to run a production box install RedHat Enterprise (or CentOS if you want the free equivalent)[**]. It is rare that you need the absolute latest version of something for your server and once it is installed and working you want to just leave it alone other than applying the latest security/... patches.

Me ? I run Fedora on my laptop & development box; CentOS on my main server & RedHat or CentOS on customers' machines.

[**] Or Debian, SuSE, ... if you prefer one of those just-as-good environments.

overblown

mattdm — Thu, 10 May 2007 03:55:23 +0000

Yeah, there does seem to be some hyperbole here. The article says "one user has already been burned by trying Nouveau" -- but the link goes to someone who tried the LiveCD and found it didn't work with Nouveau on their system, not someone who found it unexpectedly destroyed their monitor or caused them to lose data. In other words, a pretty minor "burn".

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

vlima — Thu, 10 May 2007 03:24:55 +0000

Then there is the new pata/ide drivers. None of the test releases I've tried has even booted... Bugzilla #227207.

Why is Zope a big deal?

wtogami — Thu, 10 May 2007 01:33:40 +0000

Hi, Fedora developer here, with my own personal opinion on the Zope matter.

This Zope thing is unnecessarily overblown. Zope is a server-side application. It is perfectly reasonable for users to use Zope either on FC6 (which is supported until beyond the release of F8), or better yet RHEL5 or CentOS5 which may be much better suited for long-term Zope usage.

Fedora's goal is different from RHEL or CentOS.
Fedora's primary goal:
Rapid Progress of FOSS

Holding the release of Fedora 7 due to Zope or creating a non-trivial extra maintenance burden in providing compat-python24 and an arbitrary amount of compat-python24 modules hinders Fedora in the pursuit of progress.

Similarly, criticism of including Nouveau is overblown. Disabled-by-default means we get safety by default. Meanwhile we make it easy for testing and progress of Nouveau to happen. I suppose splitting it out into its own package is a good idea. We should also have better documentation describing *how* to safely test nouveau and back out if it fails.

One legitimate case of bleeding edge danger is the iwl3945 driver currently in the rawhide kernel. It has been getting better lately, but works poorly for most users, while causing nasty system-wide problems (I/O device freakout, ops, panic) for some people. Currently that driver *is* enabled by default in rawhide. We are considering disabling or removing it before F7 if we cannot make it at least safe (if not functional) to users by default.

LWN: Comments on "Episodes from the evolution of Fedora"

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

No, Python2 was delayed due to GPL-incompatibility problems.

maybe but...

Why is Zope a big deal?

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

No, Python2 was delayed due to GPL-incompatibility problems.

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

Why is Zope a big deal?

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

Fedora is a *development* distribution

Fedora is a *development* distribution

overblown

Episodes from the evolution of Fedora

Why is Zope a big deal?

Fedora is a development distribution

Fedora is a development distribution