My recent blog post about direction and online updates sparked some interest - and some interesting discussion. Through that discussion, I wanted to post some clarifications and concessions about the original article.
Concession: I wasn't correct about my statement that Fedora has a "lack of direction" - it's direction is exactly that its maintainers can try to do what they want to improve the distribution.
Clarification: Fedora is not an easy place to get along at - Just read fedora-devel list and you will find that most people post messages that are incredibly selfish and full of negativity - this doesn't feel like "community" to me. Even in my discussion on the #fedora-devel channel, my previous post was immediate construed as "OMG apt-get rulz FTW" fanboy love instead of the actual criticism that online updates should be supported. It still took an hour of discussion to get it understood what I was desiring and for some agreement and constructive ideas to come around
Concession: apt-get upgrade might not rock - I don't have strong experiences here and shouldn't have stated that it was great.
Clarification: Fedora should support online upgrades - "Online upgrades" means you can upgrade from release X to release Y without needing to reboot into some installer (rebooting for a new kernel or FS changes are fine). Fedora does have the YumUpgradeFaq wiki page, but the very first bullet point is Don't. This mentality needs to change in order for online upgrades to succeed.
Concession: someone needs take charge to make online updates happen - As gregdek pointed out, things don't change if someone doesn't champion it. At the same time, OSS is not only about "scratching your own itch", it's about community. Just because a user requests a feature doesn't mean we should expect the user to implement it every time.
Clarification: I'm excited about Fedora, and I'd love to help make it be better - I've been a Red Hat user for 8-9 years; and I've tried other distributions in the past. The issues I've pointed out are the ones that have been bugging me for awhile now, and the ones I'd like to see changed. I wasn't really prepared for the first reply to my blog to be "well do something about it", but they're right.
I had a good discussion with skvidal, wwoods, f13, gregdek, and others in #fedora-devel about how upgrades currently work, the progress being made towards media-less upgrades, and the problems faced by online upgrades. I hope to have the ideas and concepts laid out into a wiki page soon where everyone can contribute their ideas on how to improve things.
I'm also a little disappointed that no one made it to my last point - or perhaps they were so enraged by my first two points that they just stopped reading - about packages with optional features. I know it's been discussed a little bit on the fedora-devel list, but I have no idea what it would take or what maintenance would be like. That's probably something else I should work on writing ideas down about.
3 comments
I completely agree with your observations. It really is tiring to see post after post after post on the Fedora mailing lists with the typical canned response to new ideas with something along the lines of "why don't you be part of the solution?" Yes constructive good ideas can come from people with gifts and skills in other areas besides the area they are criticizing. It is one thing to make astute well thought out observations about things you believe should change like you have done (which is good) and another to whine incessantly about wanting something to be different, but then doing nothing about it (which I don't think you are doing). Keep stirring the pot!!!
Hi Doug, saw your response on my blog and read through your posts on the subject. I would be very interested in helping out with the effort to get this fully supported. I've already got a long list of Fedora/open source development projects I'm already neglecting but I'd still like to put some effort into getting this fully supported.
A SIG sounds like a good idea. I'm guessing all we'd need to do first is (a) find people to test the live upgrade process throughout the development cycle, (b) get the Fedora community's blessing to not insta-close live update bugs against the packages causing problems (not sure if they do this now), (c) contribute discovered workarounds to the live update wiki page, (d) hopefully get rid of that 'not recommended' warning, and maybe someday (e) have a nice popup informing users when a new Fedora release is available and offering them the choice to upgrade.
The good news is I think Fedora's already frighteningly close to being able to do this, there's a good chance all I had to do was remove the i386 dbus package (I'm on x86_64) and I'd have been on my way. I'll be trying again on my desktop as soon as F8 is officially released.
What do you make of the Fedora 9 Pre-upgrade slated feature? Honestly it's pretty much the same thing, any distro upgrade is going to require a reboot, this would just require 2. It seems a little more complicated to pull off than just doing a live update to me.
Anyhow I'm going to write up another post and see what people say. I personally would be happy to contribute by testing upgrades, I've got extra hardware laying around, or could even get some virtual machines set up to test upgrades from time to time and file bugs.
[...] we do miss (apparently) seamless live upgrades between releases. So following on the heels of Doug and Devan, here is my take on [...]