Innovation and focus in Fedora

Fedora Board has been discussing about the target audience for Fedora for a long time and I hope to see some clarity from that process soon.  There has been some concerns that defining a audience is going to curtail volunteer freedom to choose their own direction and I think that is a false notion.  Any free software has a audience in mind when it gets started along with some natural biases regardless of whether we are explicit about it or not and as it grows it might change over time but sometimes there is a distortion of focus and different parts of it starts acting differently which is confusing for the end users.

We have that problem now in Fedora and it shows up in many places including how maintainers view updates to general releases.  Some are very conservative and some are quite happy with pushing the latest upstream software and while some of it can be ustified by the nature of upstream projects themselves it is always useful to some amount of consistency in this.

Fedora has been recognized for a while as a place for free software innovation and many of the fundamental changes in every distribution is driven via Fedora first and this ranges from deep changes in kernel and glibc to desktop changes like Networkmanager or Packagekit and naturally we have gathered a community which prides in being a good contributory base but it is important to recognize that if our contributions do not reach a user base directly they are not going to value it much and we should not lose sight of end users in these conversations ever  We need to tilt the focus slightly from speed to scale. Quality and robustness is a big piece of this equation and I am happy to see more visibility for the QA efforts within Fedora.

Canonical and the Yahoo deal

Canonical recently signed up a deal with Yahoo and switched the default search engine of Mozilla Firefox from Google to Yahoo and it is a interesting move with many implications and I wanted to add my thoughts on this.

It is a fairly non intrusive change atleast for new users since Firefox does allow you to switch to a different search engine very easily and it could bring substantial revenue since they have a large user base. In this agreement users search results are being traded in return for cash even if the users dont click on any advertisements (ie)  the aggregate data from the search by itself is very valuable for Yahoo. Some people have focused on the Microsoft angle and the argument is that since Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” is powering Yahoo via the deal that Microsoft and Yahoo had made earlier in essence Canonical has sold access to their users searches to Microsoft and Microsoft is willing to trade some money to compete against Google.

What bugs me more is the process in which the decision has been made however with no discussion whatsoever and no input from anyone in their community and purely as a business decision from Canonical and the result is a inferior user experience if most of their user base is expecting Google to be the default and it also affects Firefox as upstream which is the platform for this whole deal since Firefox is going to lose money.

If Fedora was looking for revenue via commercial agreements with any search engine provider I would expect far more transparency in the process and the Fedora Board would definitely be held accountable for that.  Canonical is in a tough position since there is not as much separation between their commercial product and their community project unlike Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux which has its own advantages and disadvantages. They already have made some controversial moves like integration of Ubuntu One (where the naming was itself a separate debate on usage of the Ubuntu brand) and Landscape which are proprietary services and more decisions like this are going to have ripple effects within their community and contributor base.  There can only be so much community goodwill to trade on and the balance is going to be very difficult one.  I will be watching from a safe distance.

Transmission changes in Rawhide

I had pushed the latest development release, Transmission 1.80 Beta 4 in Rawhide a few days earlier but the next update is going to bring in some substantial changes in packaging.   Transmission originally had a GTK interface and a while later, a command line version as well.  Recent upstream releases includes a Qt interface which is tagged as Beta and never built in the Fedora package before of relative immaturity of it.  A recent RFE filed by a user asked for the command line version to split up so that it can be installed on servers or other constrained environments where pulling in GTK and other dependencies are not wanted.  

I took the opportunity to consult with upstream on the Qt interface. Charles Kerr who is a active upstream developer and frequent commenter in Red Hat Bugzilla claimed that the Qt interface was now good enough to be made available to more users for feedback.   It took a lot more interactions and iterations than I originally thought but the next rawhide push should bring it split up packages for Transmission. The build is available here. 

Transmission is now a meta package that pulls in -gtk and -cli to maintain status quo for users updating from previous releases.  The -qt sub package is useful for KDE users.  The -daemon sub package is for users wanting to run just the daemon with the minimal amount of dependencies and -common pulls in the web UI parts. icons and transmission-remote command for administration. Appropriate changes have been made in comps for package groups. Have fun.

Gnote and Fedora

As the maintainer of Gnote in Fedora, I sometimes watch with amusement the discussions surrounding the project. Gnote was maintained by Hub for a while very actively and became the default replacing Tomboy in Fedora 12. Unfortunately Hub lost his interest in the project around that time. I read with the surprise the trolling from a Debian developer although the point about not relying on unmaintained projects was valid and I began talking to couple of folks with expertise in C++ ( Gnote is a port of Tomboy to C++) and Debarishi from Fedora took over and became the developer of Gnote and has been doing good work there with many new features, bug fixes and constant stream of new releases. LWN has a a recent article on this.

While a lot of people like to see projects like this as some sort of anti-mono crusade, Hub was not motivated by that goal. While I am no fan of Mono, my goal in getting Gnote into Fedora and becoming a maintainer was to provide a good option for the Fedora Live CD which had dropped Mono earlier due to lack of space. Gnote starting up much faster and using less memory was a plus as well. For Debarishi, the goal is to improve his expertise on C++ and project maintenance. Bottom line: Gnote is again maintained actively as a upstream project and benefitting users in Fedora. Free software projects don’t truely fail unless noone is interested enough to continue development and Gnote has enough interest in it now to keep the flame burning. It is not going away.

Omega (Boxer) Release

Omega (Boxer) is a Fedora Remix. It is a installable Live image with Openoffice.org and all the multimedia codecs. All the awesome features of Fedora 12 plus all the recent updates fixing a number of issues. Download and try it.

FOSS.in 2009 and Fedora

FOSS.IN, a Free software conference in Bangalore, India has put out the call for proposals and we have a very short period of about a week more for proposals. A prelimenary proposal from Fedora India has been send to the organizers for a Fedora Project day. If you involved with any upstream projects, you can register as a speaker to present a individual talk as well. Get in touch with me if you have any questions. Let’s get the ball rolling.

KDE in Linux distributions

KDE in Linux distributions tend to be always a emotional topic to KDE fans for some reasons The recent openSUSE controversy is fresh in everyone’s minds but a long time before, there was a enormous revolt against UserLinux because it said that they will just ship with GNOME. UserLinux wanted to just streamline the distribution heavily and pick one default covering specific functionality. The choices were debated extensively and none of them came out to be as controverisal as the decision to pick a default desktop environment even though the decisions were explained in length. UserLinux is dead and burried. All that revolt served absolutely no real purpose at all.

Ubuntu was explained in a Linux conference by Jeff Waugh a while back when he was a Canonical employee and one of the very initial whiteboards on their brain storming process explained the goals and one of them that stood out to me was “To be a better Fedora than Fedora” and Ubuntu did learn a lot from the Fedora process on what to do and what not to do. The time based release process and not to screw up the initial launch for example. However perhaps they also did learn extensively from UserLinux. They positioned Ubuntu to do a lot of what UserLinux had originally planned to do. One item for each functionality, a wide support marketplace and so on. Because they understood the leaving out KDE from Ubuntu would be a contoversial move, they decided to go with completely separate branding for each of their variants – Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc. This move has its own advantages but it results in asymmetric branding. Ubuntu is both the project as well as the default distribution while others are alternatives. The problem doesn’t end there though. They vehemently deny it but Kubuntu really is just Ubuntu with KDE swapped for GNOME. In other words, Kubuntu is a KDE Spin of Ubuntu.

In a recent article about Kubuntu, it was criticized as going on a downward spiral. I don’t agree with many of the criticisms, especially the claims that additional sauce on top of vanilla KDE is really necessary including patches or different branding. People really need get rid of that notion that staying close to upstream is a bad idea. It dosn’t mean you need to go blindly with whatever upstream provides but if upstream does provide a good theme, it is ok to just stick to that. Fedora includes GNOME by default but has switched but custom Nodoka theme to just vanilla upstream Clearlooks theme and GNOME support in Fedora remains top notch as it has been in the past. Among the mainstream distributions, it makes Fedora still stand out nicely because everyone else is shipping a custom theme! The response from Jonathan Riddell, lead developer of Kubuntu on the wireless situation is extremely puzzling to me:

“Kubuntu is a KDE distribution, we use only KDE and are the only major distribution to do so. This means when KDE misses something we do too, we can only ship with what exists. Unforunately when Jaunty released there was no good KDE network manager. That hurts but there wasn’t any better KDE choice. “

With all due respect, I have heard similar arguments before and that’s pure unadultered nonsense.. If you install ubuntu-desktop metapackage in Kubuntu, your OS gets converted from Kubuntu operating system to Ubuntu operating system? No, not really. It is just the same operating system and distribution with a different desktop environment. Pretending that Kubuntu is a separate operating system or distribution really is painting yourself into a corner and being religious about it means that you ship a really broken native client as opposed to just including nm-applet which works better than the KDE plasmoid at the moment. Sure, it lacks nice integration with KDE Wallet etc but why pretend there is no alternative at all? Fedora KDE Spin has included nm-applet for sometime and has far less complaints about breakage. Sure, KDE in Fedora is no perfect desktop environment either but a community should be willing to make compromises and use the best of what it is available instead of knowing shipping a broken default. Shipping GNOME or GTK software in KDE oriented Live CD is just fine when it is the better choice. I am not contributing to KDE in Fedora but I am really happy Fedora KDE team is willing to make pragmatic choices such as this.

Thunderbird problem gets fixed

The last Thunderbird 3 (beta 4) update issue I talked about in a couple of posts has been fixed and users should get a new update that disables both indexing and smart folders by default. Many thanks to the maintainers for being responsive and resolving the issues quickly. Christopher Aillon, primary Thunderbird maintainer in Fedora explained the details here.

A related issue: One of the problems which is quite common with Fedora updates is the lack of detailed description of changes. That was the case for the earlier thunderbird update as well. If you cannot highlight the important changes, the minimum you should do in every single update is to link to the upstream changelog or release notes. If you as a maintainer of the software do not atleast try to explain the changes to your users, it is not really appropriate to push the change in the first place. One way to avoid issues is to avoid pushing every single upstream release an update.

Describing the changes in a bit more detail would really help testers focus on the important changes as well as help end users determine whether the update should be applied on their system. There is a set of general package update guidelines that maintainers can follow. I don’t really think I am a perfect maintainer either. I goof up often as well. It only becomes a serious issue when people involved refuse to accept that there is a problem worth resolving. Thankfully for the maintainers involved, that was not the case this time. Sanity returns.

In the name of “Evolution”

Tim Laurisden, it is not just about “look and feel different”. It is about my mail client being unusable for quite sometime after an update. Many buttons went missing from the toolbar. My folders were rearranged. This isn’t something that is expected to happen with an update.

It is not upstream responsibility that Fedora picked up a beta release and pushed an update that caused this frustration. Xorg zapping was disabled in a new release with proper release notes. Behavior changes like that in a new release is ok. An update causing this is unacceptable. That is my opinion and I am sticking to it.

Btw, Evolution is something that happens gradually over a longer period of time. Disruption is not Evolution.

Stop screwing around with updates

If you have been a Fedora 11 Thunderbird user, the last update was likely to cause you some confusion. Two primary things:

* Smart folders
* Global indexing

While these are useful features, pushing them as an update was a really bad idea. These features should have been disabled by default in an update. The first feature rearranged my folders. Suddenly my Inbox had moved from where I expected it to some place else completely. It can be disabled by the really tiny arrow marks on top. The second feature of course sucked up CPU trying to index gigabytes of my mail while I was waiting around trying to send a urgent email. Again, this feature too can be disabled in the UI.

Maintainers should really think about whether they want to push a beta release of any software into a stable release of Fedora. If the advantages are really prominent, take extra care before pushing any updates. Think about whether the update is really necessary. If so. one week time in Fedora updates-testing is just not enough to get enough feedback on this.

While I have started running Rawhide primarily and can cope with this problem, this is not an acceptable way to treat our end users. If you are a Fedora user, I appreciate you letting us know your feedback.