Adam Williamson wrote:
On Mon, 2010-08-23 at 15:52 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> It's just risk management. I think we'd be better off acknowledging there
> are unknown unknowns and try to mitigate them. One way we could have done
> that this time around was making it an optional feature (as Matt was
> mentioning in a previous email) for F14 and then decide in F15 if it was
> ready. Unfortunately that's not the path we seem to be on. We unwisely
> seemed to declare it ready before anyone even saw it then we ignored what
> we didn't know as if we knew there were going to be no problems. The sad
> thing is that's such an easy fix by making brand new features for core
> components like this opt in, even if it's just for a single release.
Well, ironically enough, Lennart's last big revolution illustrates the
problem with that. PulseAudio - previously PolypAudio, remember - was
'opt-in' for several releases; it was packaged in Fedora and many other
major distributions, you could enable it just by installing it. It was
used by approximately no-one. People just don't opt in to big bits of
infrastructural change unless they have some very specific reason to do
so; booting the system more or less works for most people, so why would
they 'opt in' to a new init daemon?
If it's worth the revolution, wouldn't people choose to opt in?
If nobody ever opts in, perhaps it's not worth the revolution?
Just a thought ;)
-Eric