Jun12

Rawhide week in review 2013-06-11

by nirik on 2013/06/12 at 12:57 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

Another week another rawhide review post. :)

This week the main thing that stood out for me was the rsyslogd breakage. A new upstream version landed and it crashed on startup. ;( A bug was filed ( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=971471 ) and the maintainer promptly started debugging it. While there’s not a fix landed yet, it looks like it’s very close to doing so. I’d like to call out the rsyslog maintainer as doing exactly what a maintainer should do, respond promptly on bugs and work hard on fixing the problem. Kudos.

Proposals are starting to come in about changes for Fedora 20, and those will likely land before too long. Lets try and keep everything working and happy while they do, ok?

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Jun04

Distributions vs applications: Fight!

by nirik on 2013/06/04 at 3:00 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

After reading http://groveronline.com/2013/06/fedora-for-servers/ and the comments on lwn ( https://lwn.net/Articles/552800/ ) I thought I would share some thoughts on this.

First, I agree with Andy that this is a good way to use Fedora instances. With so many ways to spin up quickly a instance that does just exactly what you need it to these days, this should work great for a number of use cases. Lennart points out that containers is a even quicker/more minimal way to do things for some use cases ( https://plus.google.com/115547683951727699051/posts/G1DTXebUGGN ). Tie this to a CM like ansible and it’s easy to fire up and test your app in the next Fedora and move to it when you are ready, or even in an updated Fedora of the same version you are currently running.

Some of the comments on the lwn article in particular reiterate a strange divide that I see in the open source world. This group of folks wants a platform where they can exactly specify every version of everything they use and never have to change those versions based on external factors. To this group spinning up a Fedora instance to run their app on isn’t that appealing because Fedora the distribution only offers usually single versions of packages (or perhaps some compat packages for backward compatibility in some cases), so they have to manage their own versions/updates/setup. For them the platform itself should be only whats needed so they can bring up their own stack of tools. Thats a perfectly valid use case, and perhaps one Fedora should target some more.

That said, I’m still not sure I understand why there are so many folks who wish to design/build/maintain applications that way. Is this a fallout from many projects/people using “agile” development? Perhaps it shows my age, but what ever happened to designing an application such that it used interfaces other things it needed exposed and working with those other projects to make sure those interfaces were still stable over time or porting to new ones was possible/not too difficult? Why wouldn’t you want to leverage the distributions packaged versions of projects you depend on? Sure, you have your app working on Fedora 18 and then in Fedora 19 libfoo is libfoo2, so you keep using Fedora 18 until you have ported your app to use libfoo2 and then spin up Fedora 19 test instances and test until you are sure your app is working right. If libfoo2 dropped some functionality you needed, could you not ask them to readd it or add some new way to do the same thing?

The trade offs here seem poor to me, but of course everyone will do things the way they feel is best for their use case. I have a feeling that applications developed with a ‘ship my exact versions’ will more and more start seeing the issues in this model as time goes on, but we will see.

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Jun04

rawhide for 2013-06-04

by nirik on 2013/06/04 at 2:18 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

Another very dull week in rawhide. No particular breakage or issues here. I’ve been on the latest 3.10 rc3 kernel and since it’s an RC the debugging is off, so its been nice and fast.

I did play around with dnf a bit. dnf is the next generation yum that is being worked on (likely won’t become yum until f21-22 or so, it’s still missing a lot of features). It seems to mostly work ok, but I am not sure I’ve seen much speed difference between it and yum and it seems to use more cpu at some tasks. Looking forward to it improving more.

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May28

Rawhide week 2013-05-28

by nirik on 2013/05/28 at 1:34 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

Another week of rawhide. Only one issue really stands out from this week: The kernel switched to using a script provided by systemd to install. See: http://jwboyer.livejournal.com/47131.html for the low down. There was a slight mistake made in the script however, which meant that rawhide users wouldn’t see new kernels appear in grub.conf. This has been corrected today, and if you update to at least systemd-204-4.fc20 it should be fixed. You may need to re-install old kernels or manually add them to grub2.cfg if you want to boot them. Note that this does not affect Fedora 19 Branched, those kernels still use the old scripts and should work fine.

In other news Fedora 19 Beta went out today. A pretty smooth and uneventful release day. Please do download it and try it out and report bugs on it. F19 is shaping up to be a nice release, IMHO.

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May23

An observation on difficult to deal with community members

by nirik on 2013/05/23 at 11:51 am
Posted In: fedora, linux

I got to thinking recently: Why are interactions with some small number of community members always unpleasant?

It seems to me as a general rule that the people who are unpleasant to deal with (or at least all of those I can think of in any of the communities I am involved with) all have the same basic fundamental viewpoint: Assume malice by default.

By this I mean that when they see something and post/tweet/mention it, they approach it from the idea that the community or parts of it are deliberately conspiring, hiding, planning, or doing the thing with “mallice aforethought”, and that the community or parts of it must PROVE that they are not doing so. There also seems a subset that assume some kind of malicious ignorance (“You should google this, since you didn’t you are stupid and wasting my time”).

In contrast the vast majority of people in communities I am involved in either assume nothing (“hey, whats up with this, can you tell me?”) or assume good faith (“This looks like a bug, but perhaps I don’t understand what you are trying to do here, can you explain?”) and are generally quite pleasant to deal with.

I’m sure there are counter examples, but I wonder if in general people agree?

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