On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 07:18:58PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
I am not going to file a feature for Fedora, to remove support for
it
entirely across the whole distro. I still think dropping it is the right
thing to do, but I don't think it's a good use of my own time, to fight
this through... I'd be happy though if somebody else would pick this
up. Looking at the current FESCO members I am not entirely sure though
whether a proposal to disable libwrap would have a chance in the current
cycle though. (also, M. Miller kinda supported the proposal, which as
history tells us means he probably is _not_ going to vote for it in the
end...)
I guess I wasn't clear enough with you last time around. I thought I was
more clear this time, but I guess I'll repeat: demanding "instant progress
or nothing" doesn't get you as far as breaking things down into manageable
steps and executing on each one. Sometimes, we need to bite the bullet and
make a big painful cut, but usually we don't. When it's something like this,
(or like the default MTA, or like logging -- where there's no particular
urgency to make the change and there are reasonable Fedora contributors with
reservations, I'm absolutely in favor of phased approach.
It's a pity though that nobody in Fedora is actively working on
getting
rid of legacy cruft. I really wished we had some people who oversee
deprecating things more proactively, figure out how to deprecate things,
write stub code to provide smooth transitions, write release notes and
so on. Being at the bleeding edge of things also means deciding that
some things really should go, from time to time...
I absolutely agree. This should be an important fuction of the Base Design
working group. Before that, we also have a "Minimal Core" SIG with some
interest but not much activity (that last may somewhat be my fault, since I
kicked it off but my attention wandered).
Besides
deprecating
old cruft like libwrap, this would also mean removing all the old crap
from comps "standard" that we still install by default (894110)...
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=894110
There wasn't previously a great framework for discussing this kind of thing.
I hope that we do have that now. And just as you don't have to be a voting
WG member to contribute to a product SIG, it would be helpful for anyone
interested in this to provide constructive feedback to the Base Design
group.
--
Matthew Miller -- Fedora Project -- <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>