What's the big deal? [LWN.net]

What's the big deal?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 0:07 UTC (Tue) by sbishop (subscriber, #33061)
Parent article: Big decisions loom for Fedora

I've never heard anyone why it's bad thing for Fedora to be the beta version of the next RHEL release. If I had more time, I would like to spend time working on Fedora for that very reason: I use RHEL at work. I strongly prefer KDE over GNOME, so if I were to help RedHat ship a decent version of KDE, I wouldn't have to use konstruct.

It's not as if we need another community-based Linux distribution. Why not just admit that Fedora is what it is and be okay with that?

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What's the big deal?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 0:48 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

What if somebody started a Linux distribution and nobody downloaded it?

I don't think that there is a problem with being a beta release of Redhat, but I don't think that is what actually Fedora realy wants.

Sure a few years ago Fedora would be considured kick-ass in terms of it's structure and such, but I think that with Ubuntu people's expectations have risen. So now you have situation were people are migrating away from Fedora instead of TO Fedora. These users, the community, is a absolute nessicity for creating a top-notch Linux distro.

Red Hat should know

Posted Nov 7, 2006 1:06 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

That is not how Red Hat is selling Fedora:

The Fedora Project is a Red Hat sponsored and community supported open source project. Its goal? The rapid progress of Free and Open Source software and content. Public forums. Open processes. Rapid innovation. Meritocracy and transparency. All in pursuit of the best operating system and platform that Free software can provide.

(Emphasis mine.) So Red Hat is definitely not comfortable with Fedora being just a "beta version". Maybe because people do not usually like to work for Red Hat for free, but they cooperate freely with community distros.

Also, it has been speculated that the failure of Fedora Legacy is related to Red Hat's failure to position Fedora as a community distro. As a public company Red Hat would have a hard time justifying support for a free distro; but many community distros do that aspect just fine.

Red Hat should know

Posted Nov 7, 2006 3:28 UTC (Tue) by davej (subscriber, #354) [Link]

it has been speculated that the failure of Fedora Legacy is related to Red Hat's failure to position Fedora as a community distro.

And that speculation would be way off base.
The facts are that backporting fixes to older releases is boring as hell work, and very few people want to do it.

it's not like it's difficult to get involved with Fedora legacy, it's just that there are way more consumers than developers. Which is to be expected, but when you only have a handful of people actually turning out updates, it doesn't take long until they become overloaded.

Before a transition to Fedora legacy, there's almost a 1:1 mapping between package:maintainer. After the transition to legacy, there's a handful of developers maintaining the whole distro. This clearly, doesn't scale.

Legacy inadequacy

Posted Nov 7, 2006 8:04 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I don't even use Fedora; I just follow the news on LWN. Let me point out, from my utmost ignorance about Fedora (and most other things), the obvious flaws in your arguments.

The facts are that backporting fixes to older releases is boring as hell work, and very few people want to do it.

Indeed, but other community distros do just fine with volunteers.

Before a transition to Fedora legacy, there's almost a 1:1 mapping between package:maintainer. After the transition to legacy, there's a handful of developers maintaining the whole distro.

It is not the same task at all; Legacy's stated mission is to "provide security and critical bug fix errata packages", not to correct every bug. It should be orders of magnitude less work.

[...] when you only have a handful of people actually turning out updates, it doesn't take long until they become overloaded.

No fixes since July for FC3 and no fixes at all for FC4. This does not look like overloaded developers, but complete paralysis.

In support of my argument: if people saw working for Fedora Legacy as doing the grunt work for Red Hat for free, then they would not be willing to do it. Witness this quote from Jake Edge:

Fedora Legacy is a great idea, but appears to suffer from a lack of participation from the community.

Or (at the risk of being pedantic, but consider the imbalance in this conversation) this one from Jon:

Perhaps the time has come to ask the question: is there any point in continuing to pretend that Fedora Legacy is a viable, successful project?

Legacy inadequacy

Posted Nov 7, 2006 8:14 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

It's probably very simple: people that want a free of charge, stable Red Hat flavoured distro go with CentOS, the ones that want a bleeding edge one pick FC. So, the FL is mostly uninteresting, therefore nobody maintains the ever growing number of versions there.

Legacy inadequacy

Posted Nov 7, 2006 14:22 UTC (Tue) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]

I agree; long-term stability isn't what Fedora is looking for. But personally, I wish they supported FCX until FCX+2 was released, not FCX+2test2. This small gap leaves users vulnerable who want to upgrade slightly less frequently.

Legacy inadequacy

Posted Nov 7, 2006 17:37 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I don't agree. I have seen lots of complaints about volatility of Fedora. CentOS on the desktop is probably not a good choice; OTOH Fedora's forced upgrades are not nice.

I use Ubuntu 6.04; 6.10 is already out there, but my current desktop is working fine, so why change it? When I feel like it (or need it) I will take the time to upgrade; meanwhile I appreciate the support provided by Canonical, in this case (LTS version) exceptionally long. I would expect Fedora users to feel more or less the same; otherwise why would anyone have started the Legacy project?

Legacy inadequacy

Posted Nov 7, 2006 22:20 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Obviously people that think that Fedora's forced upgrades are not nice, like yourself (and there is nothing wrong with that - I'm just making an observation), already picked another distro, which is about 3 orders of magnitude easier than maintaining Fedora Legacy.

Initially, people thought that FL will be the answer to what RHL used to be. In order words a free, "forever" maintained, recent, Red Hat flavoured distro. It turned out that the intersection of:

- has to be Red Hat flavoured
- has to be free
- has to have updates coming
- has to be more recent than RHELx

Didn't have that many interested users/developers. Therefore, people picked different distros, including CentOS, FC, Ubuntu, Debian etc. And FL ended up being unmaintained after this initial reaction to FC/RHEL split cleared up.

Granted, there is still occasional "don't keep changing so fast" on various Fedora lists, but most people understand by now that the Fedora is life in a fast lane.

And once RHEL5 gets released and CentOS 5 gets built, the current level of interest in FL will drop by a few notches again. It's just a natural reaction to the fact that there is no point in doing the hard work that someone already did.

Legacy inadequacy

Posted Nov 7, 2006 22:57 UTC (Tue) by sbishop (subscriber, #33061) [Link]

Exactly. Thank you, bojan. That's exactly what I was getting at in my initial post.

Legacy inadequacy

Posted Nov 19, 2006 19:55 UTC (Sun) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]

Actually, CentOS is fine for the desktop. Since it's released every 18 months you may want to check for hardware compatibility or delay until the next release to support recent hardware.

But CentOS 4 as a desktop is perfect for anyone except maybe technical people that desire to have the latest and greatest technology.

For everyone else, stability, reliability, low maintenance, low-risk non-disruptive updates and long term support (7 years) is exactly what one needs.

What's the big deal?

Posted Nov 7, 2006 7:26 UTC (Tue) by csamuel (subscriber, #2624) [Link]

For my line of work (HPC clusters for scientific computing) Fedora is
actually better to use than RHEL, which is too straight-jacketed (cut
down & old kernels) and their (admirable) aim of being a long-term stable
release for servers means it is often too old to be of much interest.

The single exception to that is commercial software where the ISVs often
stipulate RHEL or SLES (even though their code usually works quite
happily with Fedora, just don't try and tell them that).