[Mageia-dev] Bye Bye Mageia

Mon Nov 26 19:25:37 CET 2012

One reason that I kept rather quiet is that e-mail conversations on
+mailing lists
+have a tendency to become flame wars, and I really want to avoid that.  It's
+very easy in public conversations to come across as a jerk, and as a newbie
+I really wanted to avoid that.  I've tried whenever finding myself in unfamiliar
+social situations to just keep my mouth shut, and listen to what's going on
+for a while before saying anything.
+
+The thing about communications is that it really doesn't scale.  One
+thing that's
+nice about the open source model is that you can go into your garage, work on
+something, and you don't need anyone's permission or to communicate or
+coordinate
+with anyone.  Coordination is a real pain, and you really want to
+structure things so
+that you can minimize coordination. Communication is also a problem.  You say
+one thing, someone replies, pretty soon you have a flame war, and you
+aren't doing
+and "real work."
+
+The thing that I'm working on in my garage is a linux workstation that
+is set up for
+hard-core astrophysics theory.  Packaging is a missing piece of
+scientific software
+since there are hundreds of scientific software packages that are not packaged.
+
+Rather than engage in vaporware, I just need some stable distribution
+that is very
+open to adding new items into some "bleeding edge" repository.
+
+I ended up with Mageia partly for historical reasons, but partly out
+of a sense that
+because it was a community distribution, it would have some easy mechanism
+for accepting "bleeding edge" packages.  Once I got through initial
+packaging learning,
+I was planning to add things like a stellar evolution code and hard
+core CFD code.  I'd
+like to add some professional astronomical telescope tracking software
+(like IRAF or
+DS9), and to hard core astrophysics research.
+
+My assumption was that as a community driven project, there would be
+some mechanism
+for adding new packages to the system, and that I wouldn't have to
+worry about getting
+permission, I would just do it.  Fedora already has a mechanism for
+doing that, but sense
+I was already using Mageia, I had thought that Mageia would be at
+least as open as
+Fedora, and that it would be easy to add large numbers of new packages.
+
+Now if I'm mistaken about this, and this is not the goal of the Mageia
+maintainers, then
+I just need to find some other platform to work on.
+
+Again, it makes perfect sense to me not to put cinnamon into Mageia 3
+core.  It's
+unstable and buggy and it's going to be a pain in the rear end to get
+it to work smoothly.  The
+problem is that if it's not possible to put Cinnamon *somewhere* in
+the Mageia tree
+so that "bleeding edgers" can work on it, then it's going to be
+impossible to use Mageia
+as a distribution mechanism for even more bleeding edge experimental
+software, and if
+that's the intent, then I've just got to find another distribution to work on.
+
+I'm not trying to be a jerk or to blackmail anyone.  It's just that if
+there is no mechanism
+for Mageia users to share bleeding edge software with each other, then
+it's not going to
+work for what I want to do with it.  urpmi and cauldron is a great
+mechanism for two nuclear
+physicists to share say the latest nuclear equation of states
+libraries, and as something
+that advertises itself as a community distribution, I was hoping that
+Mageia could be the
+center of that.  One problem that we have here is that everyone wants
+to copy Apple OSX
+and Android.  The Ipad and MacOS is a slick piece of software.   The
+trouble is that it
+only lets you do what Apple wants you to do, because if you do
+something really different
+you might break the box.  This is really, really bad for real hard
+core, scientific research
+since what you are trying to do is to push the machine to the point
+where you are breaking
+the box, and it's hard to communicate in advance what you are trying
+to do, since you don't
+know.
+
+If that's not what people want to do with Mageia, then I just have to
+accept that and move
+elsewhere.......
+