[Mageia-dev] Bye Bye Mageia

[Joseph Wang]

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.......