On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 4:59 PM, Nicolas Pitre nicolas.pitre@linaro.org wrote:
On Fri, 6 Apr 2012, Ricardo Salveti wrote:
On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 6:05 AM, Wookey wookey@wookware.org wrote:
The fundamental question really is 'are we a distro or not'? If linaro is not a distro then no-one should be expecting stable releases - we are a technology showcase, and developer quick-start mechanism, and the existing process seems reasonably appropriate for that, but if we are expecting people to actually base real work off our outputs, then he's right and we ought to change some things.
It might be the same thing, but for me the question is really "do we care about users and we want people to use our LEBs?". If we assume the LEBs are just a bunch of evaluation images to be used internally to help improving the development and testing, then you could simply say that we're not any kind of distro.
Now if we decide to have people using and consuming our LEBs (what I believe we do), then we need to think a bit further, and assume some extra responsibilities. We don't want to be a full distro, as we want to be flexible enough to break things once a while, but we really need to be aware that once we get users running our images, they will *expect* some sort of stability, putting us back as we were a distro :-)
Stability is not sufficient. Users will also expect support, updates, and security fixes, etc. And the more stable our stuff looks, the more users and user demands we'll get. Fulfilling those user *expectations* is hard and costly. Some companies are basing their entire business on that, and they do a really great job already.
We certainly don't shine at being a distro, and IMHO we shouldn't even try. If some people want the latest cool stuff we provide that's fine, but they should expect a shaky world. Existing distro people out there will pick up our work too and stabilize it. In fact, they are encouraged to do so.
That's happening already, and most of the stuff we do at the Ubuntu LEB ends up at Ubuntu itself when possible. And I know other distros are doing that as well (just not sure about Android, I really don't know how much we did ended up at AOSP), so from a distro perceptive I believe things are quite clear, it's not not that clear for our end users.
Therefore I don't think we should duplicate what distro people are already doing. That shouldn't be where our focus is. Expectations to users should probably be clarified as well.
I believe that this is the main issue here. I don't think there's any clear statement today saying that our builds are just meant to be an experimentation and focused on on development and validation. We need to be aware that once we start pushing our builds down to our users, they will expect all these sort of things you pointed out, so to avoid frustration we should put a big warning already at the download page.
That's why I believe having what I called "stable" and "unstable" builds should help a bit at least. Once our main development branch is in a good shape, we just copy that an call that "stable" (or any other better word). This way we'd be able to always have working images for demo purposes and also help our users by not breaking everything every month.
Maybe it's also time to stop calling our builds as LEBs, and get a better naming, to avoid confusion since day 0.
Cheers,