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

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 (guest, #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.