On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:59 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.
Stabilization takes time, which is why there is a delay before our stuff is available through existing distros. There is simply no way around that. Stable and latest bleeding edge are simply not compatible. If Linaro is to produce stabilized releases, we'll introduce extra delays too, and we'll consume a significant amount of development resources doing that.
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.
That is fair.. there is no point duplicating what distro folks are already doing.
It might be nice to do a better job of folding back bits and pieces of what we do into (for example) ubuntu PPA's.. for example, I think a number of people are trying linaro builds just because they want xbmc, not because they care about various other bleeding edge bits.
Although, other than OMAP, are there ubuntu PPA's to get graphics, etc, accel for other member company platforms? Ie. when someone like the FXI cotton candy folks come along looking for a filesystem they can use on their product (where presumably they care more about enablement than bleeding edge), could we tell them to use ubuntu or AOSP or whatever? I'm just wondering if there is a good "one size fits all" answer.. if there isn't a member company supported PPA for ubuntu where you can get the gfx and/or multimedia blobs, then the only-bleeding-edge-devel filesystems approach might be leaving a bit of a gap for someone trying to make a product (which is, in the end, what we care about).
BR, -R