[IAEP] SoaS change of direction: heads-up on convos in other lists

[Martin Langhoff]

Below I agree with Tomeu, and would like to extend some points
further... liberally snipped...

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 5:35 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
> What the SoaS team could have said instead of "we'll ship half a dozen
> activities", is "we have agreed on a criteria for activities that are
> to be included in a SoaS release". Such a criteria could have been
> something like:

If they had a crystall ball ;-) maybe that's the kind of place where
the conversation leads anyway...
...
good policy ideas snipped
...
> This may be more effective in tackling with the root cause, which I
> feel to be unreasonable expectation for the actual resources.

Some of the root causes are "too much churn from too many sides".

Some of this churn is the result of trying to stay on top of a wave
that moves way too much. It's a self-inflicted fire-and-motion[1]
problem. The article linked is a great read but it could be
summarised: for any rich-enough desktop environment, just keeping up
with every Fedora/Debian/Ubuntu version churn (and add the aggressive
Fedora updates policy) is a huge job, so huge that it can completely
prevent you from doing productive work.

And the result of the "everyone is on rolling updates" undertow is
that most of our users are on slightly different versions if things.
So if you don't do the insane compatibility work we're pushed to do...
then the software only works 100% for 2% of the users. For everyone
else, there's always something broken.

Debian Stable, please come back, we miss you ;-)  (with backports, of course!)

cheers,


martin
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080401/how-hard-could-it-be-fire-and-motion.html?partner=fogcreek
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