Stop spinning [LWN.net]

Stop spinning

Posted Jan 5, 2006 19:00 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's Obviously Incorrect 2006 Predictions by skvidal
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Obviously Incorrect 2006 Predictions

I use Fedora, it's a high-quality distro. But there's no reason to promote it with misleading spin.

The Fedora Foundation is "missing". You say that it's "still going through legal". So why say "false" then?

Fedora's support period is shorter than Red Hat's was in the past. Your claim that it is "longer than it was for Red Hat Linux at the time it stopped existing" is technically true, but it's spin; Red Hat drastically shortened its support period in the RH9 time frame. Fortunately, Fedora has slowed down a bit, but FC2 went from "new" to "completely unsupported" in what seemed like no time flat.

Fedora Legacy has just failed. Blame it on the community if you want, but it has shown itself incapable of producing security updates at the rate required; the consequence is that when an FC release drops out of support, it needs to be considered insecure, for use in a heavily firewalled internal environment only, with no desktop users running browsers and the like.

Fedora could make the upgrade train much easier if they increased the support window just a bit, to make it possible for people to upgrade to every second release. That's not safe now, because support for FC n is dropped (OK, "handed over to Legacy") before FC n+2 ships.

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Stop spinning

Posted Jan 6, 2006 23:43 UTC (Fri) by gregdek (guest, #35020) [Link]

Yeah, spin is bad. So let's not spin.

"Fedora Foundation is missing." False from my perspective, as I'm one of its directors :) but painfully true from yours. We have a corporate entity, and we're working on 501(c)3 status, budget, fundraising, trademark and other legal issues. We haven't announced anything yet because we'd like to have all our ducks in a row, and it certainly won't be "missing" for long -- but it's a fair complaint. Perfect is the enemy of good, and maybe we're waiting a bit too long to announce some of the salient details. But we'll figure it out. (Hey, you guys in FF-land: row harder. Oh, wait... that's me. Dammit!)

"Fedora Legacy has just failed." Truer than I'd like to admit, and a good reason to get the details around the Foundation right -- to provide Legacy with a framework to succeed. But let's not declare the patient entirely dead yet.

"Decision-making process is opaque." I have to disagree here. I will admit that you need to join some IRC meetings and email lists, keep up with Thomas Chung's excellent Fedora news, and pay attention generally, as it's a process in motion. But Fedora Extras, Fedora Docs, Fedora Translations and Fedora Ambassadors are pretty transparent, really -- for the people who are making the effort to participate.

"Impossible to contribute." Still can be frustrating to get Fedora Core folks to pay attention to bugzilla tickets. We're working on that. But that comment aside, cf. "Fedora Extras," "Fedora Docs," "Fedora Translations," "Fedora Ambassadors." Go to fedoraproject.org -- there's plenty of pretty simple ways to contribute.

Hey, sometimes a kick in the ass from LWN is a needed tonic. It's all good, baby.