move to rawhide update

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Tue, 7 Apr 2009, pgf at laptop.org wrote:

> peter, and greg --
>
> greg wrote:
> > Whichever way you go, strong leadership, patience, and many hands are
> > required to fight through the problems.  If the community cares enough and
> > develops the necessary leadership, the project moves forward.  But it's
> > never easy.
> >
> > It is my hope that people continue to use the tracking bug here, and
> > align bugs to it, and use it to assess fitness of the current release:
> >
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=461806&hide_resolved=1
>
> of course.  but the whole thing feels a lot like telling someone that 
> their local dealership has closed, and they should write to the car's 
> manufacturer for information about oil changes.  the scale of the 
> solution doesn't match the needs of the problem. (the analogy is shaky, 
> i agree.)
>
> but as an example -- if bugs filed against the XO will be summarily 
> closed by the developers because "it's not our problem, file it 
> upstream", the larger OLPC community will be ill-served.

s/larger OLPC community/larger open source community/

Because, of course, this is not a problem experienced only by OLPC.  This 
painful problem is central to every distro provider.  The answer is a 
comprehensive ecosystem-wide mechanism for distributed defect tracking, 
and we are years away from that solution, I suspect.

> users of the XO are not typical open-source enthusiasts, and they're not 
> the audience that current linux distributions are used to targeting. 
> the XO isn't a general purpose laptop, and was never intended to be. 
> it's better considered a "device", with special needs, and as such i 
> think it will be under-served by the new generic release and support 
> scheme.  while i agree that the current plan is probably the best we can 
> come up with, i remain frustrated.

Yeah, me too.  The hope continues to be that we can stabilize and maintain 
the base, and then focus on the deltas that set the device apart.  But 
it's a hard problem, made harder by a lack of resources.

> thanks.  and sorry for the non-technical venting...  believe me,
> the real target of my rant is not the folks like you two who are
> continuing the mission.

I know, dude.  It's okay.  If you have any suggestions, believe me, I'm 
happy to hear them.  :)

--g

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