August 2010

[opensuse-project] Problems with strategy discussions
by Lubos Lunak 08 Aug '10

08 Aug '10

Yesterday I read several hundred mails on this list, that is, the whole strategy discussions, and after finishing the main impression I had was that it was quite a pain to read, that a good part of the discussions is pointless and that as a whole it is going nowhere. Specifically, there seem to be two big problems: - some people taking part in the discussion do not understand some, even basic, things about the strategy discussion, such as the purpose - the strategies either fail or very … [View More]poorly state some practical aspects (most notably an answer to the question 'why should we do this?') and feel more like something abstract that should be discussed over coffee Additionally there is of course the usual problem of openSUSE mailing lists that some people make long threads even longer by straying completely offtopic or posting various irrelevant comments. And I hope the reason for this is that those people do not understand the purpose of the discussion rather than think that chatting in a huge project discussion is an interesting way to spend their afternoon. And these problems indeed reinforce each other. So, let's try to make some things clear: The purpose of these discussions: ====================== Right now, we are discussing the proposed strategies. That means pointing out their strengths and weakenesses, making them more clear, etc. The strategies are now supposed to be prepared for later, when a strategy will be selected. That specifically means that we are not voting on them now (and as such exclaims such as "with this strategy I won't be with openSUSE" are irrevelant, just like adding "me too" and similar). If you think there is something unclear about a strategy, discuss to clear it up, if you like a strategy and think it could be improved, discuss to improve it, if you think a strategy has a weakness that's been missed, point it out, and if you disagree with a strategy because of your personal preference, shut up. This is not about winning an argument. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Strategy has a description of what a strategy is and other requirements for this discussion. If you for some strange reason haven't read them yet, do so now and do not waste other people's time without doing that. Why we need a strategy: ================ And since everybody gets things better when there's an example, let's have one hypothetical case. Assume that in time for openSUSE 11.4 the latest Firefox release will be 4.0.1, which will support some latest Web technologies, but will not be as tested as Firefox 3.x and its KDE integration will not be ready. The maintainer therefore will need to choose one version as the shipped default, and there wil be trade-offs. 4.0 would be presumably preferred by most Web developers and bleeding-edge users, 3.x would be preferred by "stable" users and KDE users. For simplicity let's also assume that installing both 3.x and 4.0 at the same time is practically impossible because of not having enough contributors for solving the necessary problems. Currently it's more or less at the judgement of the maintainer of the component. This can lead to various problems such as the decision not being good for the majority (e.g. if the maintainer is a GNOME user who likes new Web technologies but the majority are users who use KDE and/or want a really stable browser) or leading to inconsistencies (a maintainer of a different component related to Web decides not to enable an experimental library for new Web technologies, making openSUSE not either for stable users or for Web developers). With a strategy, this is much simpler. KDE #1 strategy, productive poweruser strategy will most probably favour 3.x, while home for developers strategy and mobile/cloud strategy will presumably favour 4.0. Either way, it will also cause the other maintainer to not enable or enable the experimental library accordingly. Things a strategy does not change: ======================= I hope the example makes some things about strategies rather clear: - selecting a focus does not make other areas forbidden. The case above does not stop anybody from maintaining packages of Chromium or Arora. There are examples of e.g. KDE being provided as Ubuntu or Fedora spins even though they are not the focus. In fact, with the build service, unless openSUSE would decide to actively block some contributors (which would be pretty stupid), the only reason for a component not being anymore available for openSUSE would be its contributors deciding so. - contributors can focus on whatever they want and cannot be forced to switch. With a community distribution this just plain doesn't make sense. In the example, the "perfect" solutions would be making Firefox 3.x and 4.0 co-installable or fixing the problems, but if people will be interested in other areas and there won't be enough contributors to make these happen, they simply won't happen. How can somebody be forced to voluntarily work on something specific? - strategies cannot be just team strategies. For example, the KDE #1 strategy already is openSUSE KDE team's strategy, but there are problems that reach beyong the team. In the example above, with the Firefox maintainer's decision to go with 4.0, KDE in openSUSE obviously suffers and this is out of control of the KDE team. It is obvious that openSUSE not preferring a desktop cannot provide as good KDE implementation as it could with focusing on KDE as the primary desktop. This applies generally, in some cases making something better inevitably leads to something else getting worse in the real world. Clear now? I'd like to ask people, before sending each mail that makes the discussion even better, to think if it adds some new value and if it helps the purpose. If not, please just don't send it. -- Lubos Lunak openSUSE Boosters team, KDE developer l.lunak(a)suse.cz , l.lunak(a)kde.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org [View Less]

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[opensuse-project] openSUSE Strategy Discussion: The Linux Distribution Platform Strategy
by Pavol Rusnak 05 Aug '10

05 Aug '10

Hi all! Today we continue with public discussions about strategy proposals submitted by you, our beloved community. The first one is the "Linux Distribution Platform Strategy": ---8<------8<------8<------8<------8<------8<--- === openSUSE, the Linux distribution platform === == Goals == The goal of openSUSE as a project is to provide a platform for distributing Linux and software running on Linux to a wide range of users. This platform consists of tools for creating … [View More]software distributions, the openSUSE distribution as base and reference implementation, and the community supporting the tools and the distribution. On top of the platform the openSUSE universe consists of more specific distributions, which make use of openSUSE infrastructure and technology. Examples are SLES, MeeGo, openSUSE Education, KDE and GNOME live systems, and could also be for example developer or cloud oriented distributions and more. So openSUSE provides a way for subteams to address specific user groups and needs. openSUSE also provides means to distribute software independent of the environment of the user to spread Linux based software and make software easily available for use in the openSUSE distribution and systems based on it. The openSUSE distribution acts as a reference distribution, providing an environment for testing the used technology, a stabilizing ground for common components, and a real-life use case for applying technology and distributing Linux software. It's targeted at technically interested users, including programmers and system administrators. It has a focus on good user experience and making technology available to end users. It doesn't target users with highly specific technical needs. == Activities == = Essentials = * Provide stable set of supported core packages distributions can build on * Broad hardware support of components and platforms * Provide tools for package and distribution building and testing (e.g. openSUSE Build Service) * Provide common building blocks for distribution, e.g. installer, configuration tool, maintenance tools, development tools for web, native and other applications, and more * Provide home for overall community and specific openSUSE teams, e.g. bug tracker, wiki, mailing lists, collaboration tools * Create the official openSUSE distribution as reference implementation * Enable, support, and collaborate with specific teams to create their own distributions * Enable and support, and collaborate with upstream developers to build and distribute their software on openSUSE = Good to have = * Provide wide variety of packages for further use * Community for user support * Work on standards which make it easier to mix components, e.g. free desktop standards * Collaboration with other distribution platforms = No focus = * Directly providing a polished distribution for non-technical end users * Bleeding edge technology ---8<------8<------8<------8<------8<------8<--- -- Best Regards / S pozdravom, Pavol RUSNAK SUSE LINUX, s.r.o openSUSE Boosters Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xA6917144 19000 Praha 9 prusnak[at]opensuse.org Czech Republic -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org [View Less]

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[opensuse-project] A proposition regarding wiki.opensuse.org
by Ann Price 05 Aug '10

05 Aug '10

Hello, Topspot-Promotions, an established advertising company, would like to pay you for placing a small advertisement on wiki.opensuse.org for one of our clients. These days we are using a few methods of advertising to guarantee that the ad we choose will fit the site nicely. After reviewing your website I thought about an advertisement that fits perfectly a few pages on your website. For full details please contact me at ann.price(a)topspot-promotions.net. *If you have other websites which … [View More]

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[opensuse-project] [ANNOUNCE] bfq disk I/O scheduler
by Paolo Valente 04 Aug '10

04 Aug '10

Hi, I have been working for a few years (with Fabio Checconi) on a disk scheduler providing definitely lower latencies than cfq, as well as a higher throughput with most of the test workloads we used (or the same throughput as cfq with the other workloads). We named this scheduler bfq (budget fair queueing). I hope this is the right list for announcing this work. One of the things we measured in our tests is the cold-cache execution time of a command as, e.g., "bash -c exit", "xterm /bin/true" … [View More]or "konsole -e /bin/true", while the disk was also accessed by different combinations of sequential, or random, readers and/or writers. Depending on which of these background workloads was used, these execution times were five to nine times lower with bfq under 2.6.32. Under 2.6.35 they were instead from six to fourteen times lower. The highest price paid for these lower latencies was a 20% loss of aggregated disk throughput for konsole in case of background workloads made only of sequential requests (due to the fact that bfq of course privileges, more than cfq, the seeky IO needed to load konsole and its dependencies). In contrast, with shorter commands, as bash or xterm, bfq also provided up to 30% higher aggregated throughput. We saw from 15% to 30% higher aggregated throughput also in our only-aggregated-throughput tests. You can find in [1] all the details on our tests and on other nice features of bfq, such as the fact that it perfectly distributes the disk throughput as desired, independently of disk physical parameters like, e.g., ZBR. in [1] you can also find a detailed description of bfq and a short report on the maturity level of the code (TODO list), plus all the scripts used for the tests. The results I mentioned so far have been achieved with the last version of bfq, released about two months ago as patchsets for 2.6.33 or 2.6.34. From a few days a patchset for 2.6.35 is available too, as well as a backport to 2.6.32. The latter has been prepared by Mauro Andreolini, who also helped me a lot with debugging. All these patches can be found here [2]. A few days after being released, this version of bfq has been introduced as the default disk scheduler in the Zen Kernel. It has been adopted as the default disk scheduler in Gentoo Linux too. I also recorded downloads from users with other distributions, as, e.g., Ubuntu and ArchLinux. As of now we received only positive feedbacks from the users. Paolo [1] http://algo.ing.unimo.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/ [2] http://algo.ing.unimo.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/sources.php -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org [View Less]

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[opensuse-project] Confused by Contrib write-up on new wiki
by Greg Freemyer 04 Aug '10

04 Aug '10

All, My impression was that packages in contrib could be upgraded to newer versions with relative ease if the package maintainer wanted to do that. In fact, I thought that was one of the major differences between factory/distro and contrib. Reading http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Contrib#Rules_for_the_repository I see: === The repository is branched at openSUSE release time (openSUSE:Factory:Contrib -> openSUSE:<version>:Contrib) * After the branch no version updates are … [View More]

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[opensuse-project] "Terms of site" for other languages
by pistazienfresser (see profile) 04 Aug '10

04 Aug '10

http://wiki.opensuse.org/index.php?title=Help:Translation&curid=4820&diff=2… " + |[[Terms of site]] + |Please add the following header translated into your language: <nowiki>{{Info|This is an translation of the [[en:Terms_of_site|openSUSE Terms of site]] into '''LANGUAGE'''. It does not legally state terms for these pages—only the original English text of the Terms of site do that. However, we hope that this translation will help language speakers understand the Terms of site … [View More]

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[opensuse-project] "Legal"/"General disclaimer" has been moved to "Terms of site"
by pistazienfresser (see profile) 03 Aug '10

03 Aug '10

Hello list, dear administrators of all the sub-projects of the openSUSE project, the content of the URL http://en.opensuse.org/Legal or http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:General_disclaimer has apparently been moved to http://en.opensuse.org/Terms_of_site . As Redirects get regularly deleted and content gets regularly moved from one namespace to an other or form one title to an other in the new wiki see: http://wiki.opensuse.org/Special:Log/delete http://en.opensuse.org/index.php?title=Special%… [View More]

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[opensuse-project] What's the matter with the OBS PGP keys?
by Carlos E. R. 03 Aug '10

03 Aug '10

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 They are all obsolete. Just a sample: pub 1024D/BD6D129A 2008-01-22 [expired: 2010-04-01] uid Apache OBS Project <Apache(a)build.opensuse.org> pub 1024D/6B9D6523 2006-05-24 [expired: 2008-05-23] uid openSUSE Build Service <buildservice(a)opensuse.org> pub 1024D/9C800ACA 2000-10-19 [expired: 2010-05-05] uid SuSE Package Signing Key <build(a)suse.de> Worse, it is … [View More]

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[opensuse-project] Statistics from the Weekly News
by Sascha 'saigkill' Manns 02 Aug '10

02 Aug '10

Hello Mates, i'm not sure if this is the right Emaillist, but i try it. For me it would be interesting how many hit gets the Weekly News. As Example: en, de an ja. Have we an option to track that? cu Sascha -- Sincerely yours Sascha Manns open-slx GmbH openSUSE Community & Support Agent openSUSE Marketing Team Blog: http://saigkill.wordpress.com Web: http://www.open-slx.de (openSUSE Box Support German) Web: http://www.open-slx.com (openSUSE Box Support English)

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[opensuse-project] The openSUSE Project welcomes Jos Poortvliet as new Community Manager
by Andreas Jaeger 02 Aug '10

02 Aug '10

We’re proud to announce today that Jos Poortvliet will join the openSUSE project and Novell as openSUSE Community Manager starting on August 1. With Jos we’ve found a leader with excellent community building experience combined with a very welcoming nature, many fresh, promising ideas and a strong drive to grow the openSUSE Project. Jos holds a degree in Organisational Psychology from the University of Utrecht and has gained valuable experience in several professional roles ranging from … [View More]

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