Smolt, Open Invitation [LWN.net]

Smolt, Open Implication

Posted Jul 18, 2007 6:31 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

Well, it's exactly in RH style to consider themselves "Linux", things done there neccessarily "for the first time in the world", and whatever weird project name they come up with must be already familiar to the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world can do Linux too, in many cases better and faster than RH, and seems would rather like to read in an "open invitation message" a few intro words for the next buzzword :)

HTH

Smolt, Open Implication

Posted Jul 18, 2007 7:16 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Not sure what's your point if you really have any. What smolt is has clearly been described in multiple places including a lead in this news item. See http://lwn.net/Articles/241875/rss. You can always click on the links in the invitation to read more about it. There has no claim to be the first in the invitation though I haven't seen other distributions do similar things and provide the stats transparently as Fedora Project does.

Smolt, Open Implication

Posted Jul 19, 2007 16:38 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

*sigh*. Spelling the point: "it doesn't matter that something's clearly described in a few places if it's not even paid a few words in the very beginning of the announce message." Since it seems like intended for wider audience than those with inherent knowledge of Fedora-related subproject names.

In case you're not sure about this being a point, I can e.g. sort of announce hasher(7) and imply that everyone has already read the manual page to realize how much the projects they contribute to need this software packaged. Here's the link.

PS: the more ranting part was mostly related to F7 release announce which got me wondering if those writing bold stuff ever look around; particularly, there were complete free isolated build systems available ages before Fedora "invented" their own, that is since 2001 at the very least. Don't take it as a personal blame though, it's just a (narrow) corporate mindset. Still Truth Happens (TM). :-)

Smolt, Open Implication

Posted Jul 19, 2007 16:59 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Fedora folks are already talking to several distributions about Smolt and it has been described in detail many times including this news item. If you aren't yet aware, clicking on the first click would show you what you want to know. Maybe every announcement about it should include a short blurb but no harm done now.

Koji, the new build system in Fedora and has been used in the project internally in a slightly different form for several releases before being opened up and made public. Familiarity is important to those who work with the project and the build system does have several unique features which the project takes advantage of. It builds on existing software like Yum and mock. It is not the first one and probably wont be the last one. It is not specific to corporations to believe that they can get better value in starting a new project. Let the market decide.

The release announcement highlighting the ability to remix and do custom spins of Fedora was related to the tools like pungi, live cd tools and revisor rather than the build system. Slashdot just got that wrong.

See http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/05/31/remixing-fedora-7/ for details.