On 12/02/2009 07:41 PM, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:
On Wed, 2009-12-02 at 18:57 +0100, Lubos Lunak wrote:
Hello,
it repeatedly happens that there is a change introduced in the distribution that affects others yet those are not told at all or too late to do something about it.
Examples would be the removal of X configuration including keyboard layout from YaST as a consequence of deprecating Sax2, meaning that it is now not possible to change keyboard layout for KDM/XDM, or the upgrade of PackageKit to a newer version that no longer had PolicyKit as a dependency but instead started requiring its newer and backwards incompatible version polkit-1, requiring rewritting KDE support from scratch (which is the reason why KDE in 11.2 uses polkit-gnome). In the first case, I don't remember that mentioned anywhere, in the latter case, the kupdateapplet maintainer was notified (where it didn't really matter) but not the KDE maintainers. Others could probably come up with their own examples.
I'd prefer if such things didn't happen again, or at least if they were known in advance. And it even seems doable, because some changes already are announced, e.g. new gcc version, the switch to linking with --as-needed, etc.
Therefore I want to suggest that announcing important changes in the distribution that affect other components of the distribution becomes mandatory.
What would qualify for such a change is somewhat hard to specify exactly, but I'd hope using common sense to judge would do. For example "we remove support for X settings from YaST and require desktops to take care of these settings if necessary" or "we introduce new polkit-1, which is not backwards compatible to the old PolicyKit, and deprecate the old one" are clearly changes that should be announced. Something like "DHT support in KTorrent is now enabled/disabled" or "libjpeg is going to be upgraded from 6.2.0 to 6.2.1" is clearly of no interest, as long as it is not known to break other parts of the distribution - that would just create an unnecessary flood that nobody would follow.
The place for such announcements would be this list, with some specific subject to make it easier to spot them (and perhaps some more firm pointing to the right list would be needed for those who create noise, or something from http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2009-09/msg00354.html would be needed).
Comments?
-- Lubos Lunak KDE developer
Lubos,
I wholeheartedly support the concept you are advocating of a more transparent awareness of significant changes that affect our beloved distribution. And I personally endorse any effort to do that.
But, I think we what we need to first address isn't the "announcement" itself, but the distribution of that announcement. Time and time again, I have seen a topic being discussed on a particular mailing list. Then two or so months later, someone else on that very same mailing list discovers something about that topic and says "Whoa, why wasn't I aware of this?!?"
The SAX2 issue appears to be new to me. The PPC issue I've seen brought up even as far back as 4 months ago, and "Whoa" reappearances on the PPC matter since then.
There's a serious problem in how we get the information out to everyone at the same time. Not all eyes are watching at the same time. I admit, even I don't watch all the time and when I suddenly hear about something, I have to scramble a bit to find more backdated info just so I can respond in the proper context.
We also need to recognize that our Community is far larger than just our mailing list or even IRC users. There also exists a Community on the Forums and beyond that, I even define our Community as just users who don't actively follow our various venues of information distribution.
So we need to address first... HOW do we distribute relevant and significant information to our Community in a timely and broad manner? I do not believe that the decision-makers on any particular change are intentionally holding back such information. I think they're just as bewildered as the rest of us in how to disseminate that information properly.
I don't have an easy answer to that.
Are you sure we need to address the problem of 'not-all-contributors-subscribed-to-authoritative-MLs'? There _needs_ to be one central point for announcements like these. Why wouldn't anyone who wants to participate in the *development* of openSUSE want to subscribe to (or at least watch) a mailing list where important information like this is posted? As far as sub-project mailing lists and commnity forums are concerned, each of these should have someone who watches the central point of info and passes that info to the specific ML or forum and back To the problem of overlooking important information: special subject string convention like "RFC" is enough for me to catch my attention to a new discussion, and a special mailing list (e.g. opensuse-devel-announce@o.o) would be great for posting the announcment (the result of the discussion, the actual change to be done). The announce mailing list should have reply-to set to opensuse-factory@o.o. How about that? -- cheers, jano Ján Kupec YaST team ---------------------------------------------------------(PGP)--- Key ID: 637EE901 Fingerprint: 93B9 C79B 2D20 51C3 800B E09B 8048 46A6 637E E901 ---------------------------------------------------------(IRC)--- Server: irc.freenode.net Nick: jniq Channels: #zypp #yast #suse #susecz ---------------------------------------------------------(EOF)---