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Fedora and long term supportThe news that Wikipedia was in the process of switching away from Red Hat and Fedora—and to Ubuntu—has stirred up some Fedora folks. The relatively short, 13 month support cycle for Fedora releases was fingered as a major part of the problem in a gigantic thread on the fedora-devel mailing list. Some would like to see Fedora be supported for longer, so that it could be used in production environments, but that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Fedora has set out to do. The idea of supporting Fedora beyond the standard "two releases plus one month", which should generally yield 13 months, is not new. It was, after all, the idea behind the Fedora Legacy project. Unfortunately, Fedora Legacy ceased operations at the end of 2006, largely due to a lack of interested package maintainers. So, calls for a "long term support" (LTS) version of Fedora are met with a fair amount of skepticism. Just such a call went up in response to the Wikipedia news. Patrice Dumas outlined the need:
[...] it seems to me that a true Fedora LTS is
missing, that would allow those who want things that are new, including
for testing but cannot afford changing everything each year (servers for
example or user desktops). It seems to me that fedora ends up being used
almost exclusively as single user desktop, so that testing of other
functionalities is likely to be less widespread.
Fedora is not meant for production use, nor for those who cannot upgrade at least yearly. It has an entirely different mission, which Jon Stanley sums up:
Well, in all fairness, Fedora's stated goal is to advance the state of
free software. You get that by being bleeding-edge. Unfortunately,
being bleeding edge also means not being suitable for production
environments - these are two fundamentally incompatible goals. This is
why Red Hat Linux split into two - Fedora and RHEL. RHEL is a
derivative distribution of Fedora.
Many believe that folks who want "Fedora LTS" would be better served by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or, for those that do not want to pay for a distribution with support, an RHEL derivative such as CentOS or Scientific Linux. But those don't have the package diversity available with Fedora. A stable release would also want to freeze major packages at a particular version—only backporting security fixes into that version—which is definitely not what is done with Fedora while it is being supported. Dumas wants to see something that finds a middle ground:
Fedora legacy (or fedora lts) would not be the same than centos. Maybe a
Centos + repository with more recent stuff would be, but currently I
think that there is something in the middle between fedora and centos
that is missing.
The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) project is meant to help fill that gap, by maintaining additional packages—beyond what Red Hat maintains—for RHEL and compatible distributions. Typically, though, those packages will also be held at a version level that will, with time, grow rather obsolete, at least to those who want to more closely follow the upstream project. And, of course, there aren't as many packages available for the enterprise distributions, even with EPEL, as there are for Fedora. It would seem the classic tension between "bleeding edge" and stable as described by Stanley. Though it isn't clear how it would solve that problem, there are calls for reviving Fedora Legacy. There are few opposed to the idea of continuing Fedora support—if enough people can be found to do it—but the implementation details seem to bog things down. There is a bit of a "chicken and egg" problem in that attracting package maintainers is hard to do without a project to point to, but convincing the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) that it is worthwhile without having those maintainers will be difficult. One of the sticking points is the availability of infrastructure—servers and bandwidth primarily—for any nascent legacy project to use. The Fedora board is seen as being resistant to allowing the use of the Fedora infrastructure for such a project. In response to someone who pointed out that the board's approval is not required, Dumas disagrees:
When it requires cooperation with the infrastructure, it does. It is
also possible to start something external like rpmfusion, but the amount
of work is very big. My proposal only made sense if the economies of
scale realized by working inside the fedora project were realized.
Still, if somebody provides the infrastructure, sure I'll try to help with a project similar than the one I proposed, but I cannot myself do anything for the infrastructure part. There is also the question of what kind of guarantees a legacy project would make about how long it would support older releases. Dumas and others seem to be in favor of essentially no commitment, maintainers would continue supporting their packages for as long as they wished. While there is some attraction to that idea—it certainly reduces the number of maintainers required—it is unclear that it actually provides a useful service. The idea that some security fixes are better than none is attractive, but David Woodhouse cautions against that view:
If we present the _appearance_ of a distro with security updates, while
in fact there are serious security issues being unfixed, then that is
_much_ worse than the current "That distro is EOL. Upgrade before you
get hacked" messaging.
For anything to have the Fedora name on it, it _must_ have guaranteed security fixes for at least the highest priority issues. As the original Fedora Legacy project wound down, it left just this kind of impression by promising support, but often not delivering it. For several years, updates for serious security problems were delivered late, if at all. Any new effort in that direction would have to be very clear about what it was delivering and how it planned to get the job done. A project that offered few, if any, guarantees would not be seen as something very useful, but making guarantees that don't get met is far worse. While there are clearly Fedora users that would be interested in hanging on to their operating system for longer than one year, it isn't clear that there are enough of them—and, more importantly, enough maintainers—to make a legacy project successful. Agreement on the goal of the project, along with the promises it would make to adopters is important. It is difficult to see how the Fedora powers-that-be could allocate resources to such a project without those things. As Shmuel Siegel points out:
You are looking for
infrastructure support from Fedora without indicating that there is a
benefit to Fedora. Supply without demand is no more useful than demand
without supply. Since Fedora views itself as "the cutting edge distro",
you have an uphill PR fight. Give the Fedora project a reason to spend
some of their limited resources on you. At least let them know your
target audience and why they would be interested.
At least at this point, it doesn't seem like a revival of Fedora Legacy is in the cards, which leaves the problem unaddressed. Perhaps adding enough additional packages to EPEL will allow CentOS to truly become "Fedora LTS". It should be noted that while the original concern that LTS users might be switching to Ubuntu could well be true, Ubuntu LTS doesn't have a solution to the problem of package versions slowly getting obsolete either. Newer packages and stability are fundamentally at odds—trying to solve that problem is probably far too large of a job for any community distribution. (Log in to post comments)
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 20:17 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (guest, #41334) [Link]
Being a Red Hat employee I know too little about Ubuntu -- could somebody share their experience how good LTS support of Drapper really is? How many packages were updated in the last year (or last six months)?
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 21:02 UTC (Fri) by kh (subscriber, #19413) [Link]
I have found it to be very good. I have it in use for a number of servers, including one with the commercial version of Zimbra. I like a number of things (e.g. RPM/yum) about Redhat/Fedora better, but I just could not keep up with the project's pace, so I have since moved everything to Ubuntu. I had provided documentation, and a small fix to the skeleton files of Fedora in the past, so I think the project lost a bit more than a user with me.
I really wish Redhat well, so please don't take any of this as anything but my attempt at constructive feedback.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 21:07 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (guest, #41334) [Link]
Why not CentOS?
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 21:19 UTC (Fri) by kh (subscriber, #19413) [Link]
I guess the main reason is that I wanted to be part of a community that was creating something vs just repackaging someone else's work.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 21:31 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Why aren't you using debian then?
-jef
Debian? Posted Oct 17, 2008 23:56 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]
Debian doesn't have an LTS version either. :-P
It had what looked like a LTS version because of its rather long release cycle, but it seems that the Debian maintainers are fixing that.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 13:35 UTC (Sat) by kh (subscriber, #19413) [Link]
I have to admit that the primary reason was at first mostly pragmatic, Ubuntu seemed like less work than Debian. (I come from a background of Solaris, HP-UX, Slackware, Redhat/Fedora.) Most of the Debian users I have met in real life seem to have different computing priorities than me. I am not trying to be critical of Redhat or Debian.
I put Ubuntu on my son's computer, then my notebook, then transitioned a couple servers. It was a sometimes painful experience. (e.g. I realize many people would call me odd, and for a number of reasons, ;-) but I really prefer sendmail, and I ran into Ubuntu specific bugs in sendmail, and then others in postfix after I gave up on fighting the sendmail battle during my first server trials with early versions of Ubuntu.)
With all that said, I would not consider Debian now because I want a commercial company to do well in the Linux business. Actually, I want many to do well, and Redhat is one of my favorite companies - I really do not wish to criticize Redhat, it's employees, or Fedora. Their products just do not quite fit my needs right now. I still recommend RHEL, and have helped other companies deploy it. I do not think Fedora is appropriate for production servers though, unless the admins have a lot more time and energy than I do.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 15:25 UTC (Sat) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link]
Unless you're paying Canonical for Ubuntu support, leaving Debian out as a choice doesn't make sense. Improvements to Debian (which include translations, packaging, fixing bugs, or even just filing bug reports) also improve Ubuntu. Ubuntu regularly rebases on Debian, at which point Debian's improvements (as well as so Debian's newly introduced bugs) find their way into Ubuntu. If you help squash those bugs in Debian, they won't be there affecting Ubuntu users. Also note that there are other commercial distributions basing their work on Debian, so improvements to Debian also improve those.
By all means, if you're looking for commercial support, go with Ubuntu (or RHEL).
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 3:14 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
So you can't be with Ubuntu. Clever choice.
Ubuntu DOES create something Posted Oct 18, 2008 6:49 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Sorry, but Ubuntu DOES create somethig. Yes, they pull a lot of stuff from Debian repositories, but they DON'T send you to Debian mantainers to fix common bugs and they DON'T close bug as WONTFIX with message "this is as in RHEL so we can not do anything about it". If you reject any distributions which reuse work of others then you should reject them all and go with pristine sources...
Re: Ubuntu DOES create something Posted Oct 18, 2008 19:19 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] Yes they create something, here is what...: an unnecessary indirection. 1. Replicating bugs from Debian (as unfortunate as Debian bugs are), 2. adding more bugs not present in Debian, 3. bad bug management and 4. bad user impression. 1. Now all Debian bugs are REPLICATED. I will ignore the OpenSSL debacle, but consider for example the long-standing lack of UTF8-by-default in earlier Debian versions. This propagated, and now I am stuck for years with that issue in enterprises having made the idiotic choice for Ubuntu6LTS. (Is it because of the LTS sticker? Failure to see that Debian has a stable that is at least as good? Or is it blindly following the Ubuntu hype.) 2. This indirection introduces ADDITIONAL bugs, example here is the drop of privileges in the login process after the user was authenticated. (Ubuntu6; it eventually got fixed in later ones.) This horribly broke the PAM session closing code because some modules relied on having the superuser privileges that all other major distros retained. I agree with you that they should not send the user to Debian maintainers after all, it might be an Ubuntu-specific bug. 3. Consider a relatively small package that nothing depends on and which has a bug. Commonly, sid is updated with the new version and users will usually pick the package from sid, silently, to get their bug fixed. 4. As a result, users continue to hit the bug and complain in forums. Many of these users cannot distinguish between (a) it is a newly-discovered bug, (b) bug is fixed upstream, but Ubuntu does not update it, (c) bug in the Ubuntu package (see item (2)). This puts the software into an incorrect bad light because users just claim xyz not working, software sucks.
Re: Ubuntu DOES create something Posted Oct 20, 2008 5:48 UTC (Mon) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
Cry me a river. What -is- it with Ubuntu that so annoys otherwise sane people that they turn into vitrol-spewing half-trolls ?
Any derivative always risks introducing own bugs. Nobody is immune to this. It's not as if Debian, Redhat, or anyone else is free from introducing bugs not present in upstream. (you yourself mention the most prominent recent example, then say you'll 'ignore' it. That's fine but it doesn't make it go away)
Any derivative that DOESN'T change things duplicate the bugs in upstream. Duh !
As for the "bad user impression", did it ever occur to you that people use Ubuntu for reasons OTHER than that it gives them a bad impression ? And reasons -other- than being clueless ?
Frankly, your condensing tone doesn't in the least make me sympathethic to that part of your complaint that is legitimate. (namely that communication and integration with upstream could definitely be better)
It also misses the mark. I've run Linux since I installed the 1.2.13 kernel coming with slackware whatever-it-was from a CD-ROM that was stilled divided into "floppy sets", I've run and administered hundreds of linux-machines of 3 architectures on half a dozen or so different distributions. Today I run ubuntu on all my personal boxes, except one that runs a different flavour every month that I use for testing and playing around.
Ubuntu has, in actual fact, managed to get something right. Refusing to allow that doesn't make it go away either.
And the tone you, and many like you, are using isn't likely to actually make anyone sympathethic to your views.
Re: Ubuntu DOES create something Posted Oct 20, 2008 10:06 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
From the dawn of time there have been people telling us that we should be /grateful/ that somebody is causing us problems because at least they're showing an interest. Sure, the boy next to you keeps pulling your hair, but it's because he likes you and doesn't know a better way to show affection. This won't wash.
Ubuntu is terrible at doing half of what a distribution is supposed to do (mediating between users and upstream). That's not the fault of Ubuntu users, it is Canonical's fault. And the Ubuntu fanboys respond to every criticism with "But Ubuntu is popular" as though somehow "popular" makes it all OK.
There is no reason Ubuntu can't fix their mess and stay popular. There's no reason to believe that people who don't like Ubuntu because it is /causing them problems/ will still not like it if those problems are fixed. Characterising everyone who doesn't agree with you as a "half-troll" doesn't fix anything.
Actually that's not true... Posted Oct 20, 2008 11:01 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Ubuntu is terrible at doing half of what a distribution is supposed to do (mediating between users and upstream) But Ubuntu's business model practically depends on this. If you'll look at Ubuntu's site you'll find that they sat that "every computer user should have the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees" - and they follow on this promise. Yet they don't say "every computer user should have the freedom to whine to us and we'll help him". This feature is sold separately. How many users who complain that bugreports are ignored and communication is one-sided are actually paying for support? Ubuntu quite explicitly separated these two issues - it has nothing to do with being popular or unpopular. Since Ubuntu is popular they can offer you palliative: ask users for help - sometimes it helps, sometimes does not. But if you want to have non-zero priority for your bugs - you should pay for the privilege. Looks pretty logical to me. There is no reason Ubuntu can't fix their mess and stay popular. But can they fix their mess and still be profitable? That's the question. There's no reason to believe that people who don't like Ubuntu because it is /causing them problems/ will still not like it if those problems are fixed. But there are reason to believe that people who are happy with free support will not bother to pay. P.S. I'm not saying Canonical created this problem on purpose. But since they have no incentive to fix this problem and every incentive not to... Why bother? IMO sensible approach for them will be to ignore bugreports for most of the cycle then early after release check if they still persist and fix them if they do for the next version of Ubuntu. Unless these are security-related problems, of course.
Re: Ubuntu DOES create something Posted Oct 20, 2008 12:33 UTC (Mon) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
Nobody is saying you should be grateful for problems. What I'm saying is that maybe, just maybe, some of the actual users of Ubuntu, of which there seem to be a few, use it because they perceive it (rigthly or not!) to be a *good* fit for their needs ?
There's a large difference between harm and too-little-help. The real critique of it has been mostly the second variety; not ENOUGH is done to ensure bug-reports are efficiently communicated upstream, and bugfixes make their way upstream etc. I can agree with this. But that doesn't mean the hyperbole. I don't see anyone pulling anyones hair, frankly.
I didn't say being popular made anything ok. I said being popular may sometimes be a sign of actually getting some of the things that matter to USERS right.
I do agree it should be possible to do right onto users and at the same time ALSO do right unto upstream.
The trollish aspect is the typical open or hidden claim that anyone who uses Ubuntu is somehow clueless or harmful or doesn't know his own best. That's frankly insulting, and certainly nonconstructive.
I've run Slackware, Debian and Fedora for years. Frankly I don't think which distro I ran made much difference at all to how useful (or not!) I am to the overall Linux ecosystem. The few things I *did* trough Launchpad (some minor translation-work and reporting a single bug) are both present upstream today (in Gnu nano and nautilus-actions), so though things aren't perfect obviously some stuff is working some of the time.
In short, "ubuntu should do X" is constructive. "ubuntu-users are idiots, ubuntu is similar to the bully you knew in highschool" isn't.
Re: Ubuntu DOES create something Posted Oct 20, 2008 15:30 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
What -is- it with Ubuntu that so annoys otherwise sane people that they turn into vitrol-spewing half-trolls ? """
I'd love to have an answer to this question, as well. People whom we otherwise respect go ballistic to attack Ubuntu. I've already mentioned this in the current thread. But I really do think that Morrisey hit it on the head way back in 1992. We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb1uytt7zaM
Re: Ubuntu DOES create something Posted Oct 21, 2008 2:09 UTC (Tue) by joey (subscriber, #328) [Link]
"but consider for example the long-standing lack of UTF8-by-default in earlier Debian versions. This propagated, and now I am stuck for years with that issue in enterprises"
Debian is a vast collection of software. For a long time, much of this software had issues with utf-8. Debian and others performed a lot of work to fix various things to work with utf-8, and it eventually reached a point where Debian decided to enable utf-8 by default, since not too many things would break. (Although the number of utf-8 issues that remain is not exactly anywhere near nonzero... I seem to run into about 1 per week.)
You make it sound as if Debian perpretrated a lack of default utf-8 on the world somehow, which is a really strange reading of the above facts.
Furthermore, if Ubuntu chose to base off of a version of Debian that did not use utf-8 by default, there's no particular reason they couldn't revisit Debian's decision. Since the part of Ubuntu distributed on CD is about 21 times smaller than all of Debian, they could look at that subset, and, if it supported utf-8 well enough, make the switch. This ability to move quicker could be construed as one of the advantages Ubuntu can bring to its users. I don't remember if they significantly leapfrogged Debian in enabling utf-8 by default or not, but they certianly *could* have.
(Good greif, did you actually coax me into *defending* Ubuntu?)
Re: Ubuntu DOES create something Posted Oct 21, 2008 2:32 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>Debian is a vast collection of software. For a long time, much of this software had issues with utf-8.
Hell I am not even talking about the vast software, but the base system. Simple stuff like the terminal being in utf8 mode and $LC_CTYPE being sth. like "en_US.UTF-8". I think it was Suse and Fedora that were among the first that I remember had utf8.
But you can also look at it another way if you don't like me pointing at Debian. Look at Slackware. If Debian is your standard definition of when features are complete and should be activated, then Slackware is quite late in enabling utf8.
>there's no particular reason they couldn't revisit Debian's decision [...]they could look at that subset, and, if it supported utf-8 well enough, make the switch.
Well that would have been a *real merit* if they did. But they did not do squat.
Re: Ubuntu DOES create something Posted Oct 21, 2008 8:22 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] Ubuntu has defaulted to UTF-8 locales since 5.04 – the second release ever made. If you have a box that has old non-unicode locales set up, it'd be interesting to know how it got into that state. If you want to fix it you could try the recommendations in the 5.04 upgrade guide. For all the Ubuntu boxes I've set up in recent memory, unicode locales have been selected by default.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 21:34 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
There is a large gulf between Fedora and CentOS. With Fedora/RHEL/CentOS you have a choice:
Bleeding edge. Less well tested. (e.g. in F8, gdm defaulting to not allowing more that 16 users and then ignoring its config file, for several months before a fix was in place.) Have to upgrade every 7-13 months.
Or...
By the time you get the software it's already old. Then you get to live with it for, nominally, 18-24 months. Longer in actuality.
It is (unofficially) possible to "side-grade" between them. But to go from Fedora to RHEL/CentOS you can only do it by hanging back (as much as you can without sliding out of the security update window) on your Fedora upgrades until a window opens in which the new RHEL/CentOS packages are newer than your current Fedora packages and you can do it.
Ubuntu gives you a different choice:
Reasonably well tested release. Current, but not bleeding edge. At any time, you can choose to upgrade or not. If you upgrade to a non-LTS release, you can upgrade or skip the next 2 releases (12 months), but must upgrade by at least the 3rd. (18 months).
Or...
If you choose only LTS releases, you can go 3 years between upgrades for desktops, and 5 years for servers. You can, of course, upgrade to a non LTS release at any time.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 21:57 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] It is (unofficially) possible to "side-grade" between them. But to go from Fedora to RHEL/CentOS you can only do it by hanging back (as much as you can without sliding out of the security update window) on your Fedora upgrades until a window opens in which the new RHEL/CentOS packages are newer than your current Fedora packages and you can do it.And that right there is the challenge to rise to. Can this be handled better? Is there the community interest to make room for a better way to do that transition? Can things be more structured to create better understood transition windows? Quite frankly is a totally unexplored area of discussion. -jef
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 22:54 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
Quite frankly is a totally unexplored area of discussion. """
And I'm quite glad you are exploring it. But I'm not sure that simply providing a more serviceable corridor between Fedora and RHEL will get you the same thing. With the Ubuntu upgrade path you have a continuous thread you can climb, in a release by release fashion, or in a skip one/take one/skip three/take one fashion. But each release is intended to be production ready. The support schedule is what varies. With Fedora/RHEL you have a somewhat larger gap. Fedora (as a technology showcase) can say "Hey, Look! We've just dumped cool new Feature X into the distro!" (crash). Meanwhile, RHEL/CentOS are chugging along with very serviceable and reliable, yet somewhat behind the the curve, offerings.
Some of us would like choices that a little more in between.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 23:03 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I'd love a pony! A purple pony!
There's what people want, and there there is what is sustainable...I'm only interested in exploring ideas which have a potentially sustainable future. I am not interested in figuring out how to make sure everyone gets the pony they really want. If your version of a purple pony happens to be something in-between, but ultimately unsustainable, then I guess you'll be as disappointed as I am every morning when I don't find my purple pony standing in my front yard.
-jef
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 23:12 UTC (Fri) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
You tried to avoid the subject (and kinda failed if I may say so).
Fedora cannot be deployed in production from my experience. When it is released it is way too bleeding edge ( buggy ) and after 3 to 5 months when most bugs have been squashed it has only 10 to 8 months support.
That is way too fast for almost everybody!
Ubuntu on the other hand really accels in this scenario.
That was the point.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 0:01 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
You tried to avoid the subject (and kinda failed if I may say so). """
Indeed, he did. That's what people do when they've promised purple ponies in the past... and then some other distro actually delivers them.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 18:22 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
One issue that I see a lot of is "Ubuntu is great! Everyone should use Ubuntu!!! It has a long term support plan etc etc." If one asks them "Do you pay for that Support?" I get back 90% of the time "Oh no.. they give it away for free!" which is nice, but only a short time outlook. A capitalistic/social commons needs a larger percentage of the people paying for its upkeep to maintain itself.
Unless you are paying Canonical, and convincing other Ubuntu users to pay for LTS.. you will not see it last. The reason LTS exists is because Shuttleworth is paying for people to work on fixing old crap. When Shuttleworth runs out of money (which depending on how much he had invested in the Stock Market/Icelandic banks could be pretty quick).. the free ride is over and people will have to find someone else to fix the stuff because most developers don't like trying to figure out if some 5 year old program can be fixed against some new style of attack.
So my main statement is if you are for Ubuntu. PAY FOR IT if you want to PROMOTE IT so it will be there 10 years from now.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 1:29 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
When Shuttleworth runs out of money (which depending on how much he had invested in the Stock Market/Icelandic banks could be pretty quick).. """
While I certainly support the idea of investing in a distro one believes in, I don't appreciate the campaign of spreading Fear, Uncertain, and Doubt against Ubuntu. Regarding your specific concern, let me remind you that Mark's fortune was built upon knowing what to invest in and *when to get out*. He sold Thawte in December 1999. The dot-com bubble burst 3 months later.
I would like to see Canonical turn a profit. But the situation is not so dire as you make it out to be. If the worst should happen, and the paparazzi photos of Mark in line at the soup kitchen begin appearing in the supermarket tabloids (BTW, did you know that Britney is having Elvis' baby?) then the Ubuntu formula *will* be replicated. Because Ubuntu has clearly demonstrated a formula that attracts users better than the formulas used by other distros. Whether it is a formula that other distros want to follow is another matter. For example, it would be a terrible fit for Fedora. The Fedora devs want to present the bleeding edge of Linux development. They would never be happy cultivating a large user base. Some in the Fedora community seem to *think* that they would. But that is, in my opinion, a case of "be careful what you wish for".
Ubuntu attracts many users Posted Oct 19, 2008 3:49 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] So what? If the result isn't a self-sustainable business model, it is of no real importance. AFAIU, Ubuntu has yet to show a profit, even with its massive user base coupled with few full-time developers.
Ubuntu attracts many users Posted Oct 19, 2008 4:52 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
even with its massive user base """
And the even more massive "sour grapes" phenomenon it has generated among fans of the less popular distros.
"""
Spoken like a true FOSS devotee.
Ubuntu attracts many users Posted Oct 19, 2008 17:44 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] """ If the result isn't a self-sustainable business model, it is of no real importance """ Some way of paying for build servers, distribution, bug handling, ... has to be found. Last but not least somebody will have to cough up the paychecks for a few key people. If all that is just "provided by $MECENAS, until his patience runs out", it is not a sustainable model.
Ubuntu attracts many users Posted Oct 19, 2008 20:45 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
it is not a sustainable model. """
I get the impression that the FOSS community (or is it the RedHat/Fedora community?) is really reaching here. Who pays those bills for Debian? I guess Debian is "unsustainable". And has been for the last 15 years. Yes, Red Hat has found a way to make money... lots of it... from FOSS. I applaud them. And I am pretty much in the Red Hat camp. Used RedHat Linux from 4.2 on, 1997, use CentOS today, yadda, yadda, yadda... But Ubuntu is an impressive new force which is causing people to sit up and take notice. I wonder why we are so resistant to it? Could it be that we hate it when our friends become successful?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb1uytt7zaM
Ubuntu attracts many users Posted Oct 20, 2008 10:35 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Debian pays its bills. There's no reaching here, Debian's model involves large numbers of volunteers. We know it works because - voila, Debian. But it's also clear that this model doesn't produce Ubuntu, it produces Debian. Which is nice, if you like that sort of thing.
But you can't say "I will take this distro's resources, and assert that it could be combined with this other distro's philosophy and produce this third distro's product" because there's no reason to believe that works.
The existence of Ubuntu doesn't prove that Debian style volunteers could produce a Fedora alternative but with long term support, any more than the existence of oil-rich Saudi Arabia proves that desperately poor Ethiopia could become lush green New Zealand.
Maybe that's not a great analogy, but hopefully it makes my point.
Ubuntu attracts many users Posted Oct 20, 2008 16:20 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
Either Debian is the Rock of Gibraltar or it is not. I think we can consider Debian to be reasonably permanent. Ubuntu, standing on the shoulders of Debian might be considered permanent in the way that, say, the Hawaiian islands are permanent. Sure, they might fall below the waves someday. But no one worries about visiting there or moving there. My analogy fails at the point that it does fall below the waves. Because Ubuntu has revitalized the concept basing distros upon Debian. Debian, due to Ubuntu, has regained its position as a substantial force in the Linux world. If Ubuntu were to fail, a new Debian-based distro would take its place. I am probably making myself look like a Debian fanboy. And I am not. I rather dislike Debian. I'm a Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora guy! But I like what Ubuntu has done with it. And now the world has seen what can be done with Debian. That genie cannot easily be put back into the bottle.
Shareware? Posted Oct 20, 2008 8:00 UTC (Mon) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
That sounds a bit like shareware to me. While I like the idea of it, I would not feel happy depending on voluntary contributions to run a software business, since they are something that can come and go. For a business model, I prefer the idea of selling something that people would not have if they didn't pay for it. (Of course, free software has shown often enough by now that it can be sustainable even when it isn't a sustainable business model).
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 23:57 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Some of us would like choices that a little more in between.
Well Debian gets close to that somewhat.
As you know there are three main branches of Debian at any one time.. Stable, Testing, and Unstable.
With Debian's package management system is fairly flexible when dealing with those sorts of things. You can optionally configure 'apt-pinning' which gives different weights for different branches.
For example you can configure apt-get to always pull packages from Testing, but if they don't exist in Testing apt-get will pull them from Unstable.
If you configure Stable + Testing + Unstable in your system you can give the greatest weight to Testing. This way you can avoid a lot of the churn that comes into play when using Unstable. That way if you want to use OpenOffice.org 3, for example, it's avialable for Unstable, but not testing. So you can pull that specific package down and give it priority.
This sort of thing is what I do to get buy with Debian. My work system uses testing and my home systems use unstable. I'll use approx (a package proxy) to cache packages so that I don't waste bandwidth on copying down multiple copies of the same packages.
----------------
The major suckage about Testing, however, is that directly after a release it's mostly useless. Unless your involved in development your far better off tracking stable for some time, after a release, before switching up.
-------------------
Now if you want to track 'Stable' and backport packages it usually takes a bit more effort.
For doing that your better of just leaving your apt-get stuff configured to use stable only for binary pakcages, but track testing or unstable for source packages. Also tracking backports.org is a good idea.
This way you can recompile packages from source specifically for stable. Almost all packages should backport themselves with little to no effort. Sometimes you have to recompile some dependences, but that's not usually much.
This is because if you pull binary packages from Testing then it has the tendency pull many more dependences then it actually needs. So you end up with a hybrid testing/unstable/stable system, which defeats the whole point of running stable.
But by recompiling packages you get the ability to benefit from stable systems, but get the newer versions of software you need for your production system.
-------------------------
This sort of approach is largely unsuccessfull with Ubuntu, unfortunately. This is because Ubuntu is much less disciplined about packages and backwards compatability. The only reason it works as well as it does in Debian is just through brute force developer hours.
-------------------------
However even if you use pure Unstable system you won't be able to keep up with Fedora. Fedora's a developer's playground and has the cutting edge features before any other system.
Debian benefits from this hugely. If it wasn't for Fedora being cutting edge and thrashing out bugs and doing all that sort of work.. that work would fall to Debian which would consume massive amounts of resources and manpower. I don't think Debian, as a orginization, would be able to cope with what Fedora does.
Without Fedora (and Ubuntu) Debian would be much more of a mess to deal with.
(and visa versa.. without Debian working on multiple arches and making sure that all the diverse software options worked with one another cleanly (for example: With Debian I can equaly choose between using Sendmail, Exim, or Postfix without breaking stuff badly.. and I can choose equaly between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, or XFCE, and even others. Everything 'just works', mostly.) then Fedora and others would be worse off)
Debian mix and match, long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 0:02 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] That is a lot of work for the user of such a mongrel... and the idea of using a distribution is precisely to avoid such labor-intensive setups. Besides, if you want rock-solid stability, you won't get any guarantee for such a mix-and-match setup. On the distribution side, keeping stuff backward compatible (in a fashion) for who knows how long is a resource drain that I'd prefer see spent on moving forward.
Debian mix and match, long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 20:51 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Beleive me.. Maintaining a working 'testing' distribution is much much much easier then maintaining a latest Fedora setup.
The way things work the packages are designed to work like this. In fact doing what I described works better then trying to be a 'pure' testing user. If you 'pin' packages so that you tell the OS to prefer 'testing' over 'unstable' but allow you to install 'unstable' packages then you avoid a lot of pitfalls that go along with package management.
-------------------------
And back porting newer packages from testing to stable, by recompiling packages from source packages allows you to use a stable distribution, but selectively upgrade the specific peices of software you need that may be too outdated for what you need. For example: if your tying to run a PHP website you downloaded off the net, but the mysql PHP packages from Debian stable are not new enough then it's easy to selectively upgrade those specific packages you need.
-------------------------
Basically: If you think this sort of thing is very hard to run and maintain then you have not done it.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 2:49 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
As you know there are three main branches of Debian at any one time.. Stable, Testing, and Unstable. """
Yes. The Debian Shell Game.
Dialog:
"Debian's old and moldy compared to Distro X".
"No! It's not! It's cutting edge! Use Testing!"
"I couldn't get 'Testing' to install."
"Then try 'Unstable'!"
"OK. Unstable installed, but it has problems 'A', 'B', and 'C'."
"Well, I've just checked and I don't see a bug report from you. Why did you not complete your assignment?"
"I wasn't really thinking of it as an assignment. It's just that everyone was telling me how great Debian was and stuff.
"Well... I still don't see a bug report. You are making me vewwy angwy!!! Try Unstable NOW and file any bug reports!"
But now Linux has trashed my computer. I'm having to post from my girlfriend's Vista box. The word "GRUB" is covering my screen and scrolling up fast. I'm starting to get a little agitated myself.
"Well, it's called "Unstable" for a reason! You should have used stable if you wanted stable! Doofus!"
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 20:53 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> "Well, it's called "Unstable" for a reason! You should have used stable if you wanted stable! Doofus!"
At work I have friends that use Fedora, just because that is what they want to use. The amount of times that he has a non-working box (ie: something he depends on is broken) after a upgrade with Fedora is considerably more often then what I have to deal with on any of my machines.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 21:38 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
At work I have friends that use Fedora, just because that is what they want to use. The amount of times that he has... """
Friend or friends? You are not clear on that point. Yes, Fedora breaks a lot. RHEL and CentOS are substantially more reliable. The Fedora guys do play something of a shell game. Nominally, Fedora is Red Hat's alpha, or beta, or whatever you want to call it. Fedora fans will try to trick you into thinking that Fedora is production ready. After all, they are not the ones who have to deal with the problems.
In general, I prefer CentOS. But if my life depended upon OS reliability, and I could only choose between Debian and Fedora... I'd choose Debian. Without the constraints, I'd choose CentOS.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 14:46 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]
> ....The amount of times that he has a non-working box (ie: something he depends on is broken) after a upgrade with Fedora is considerably more...
Are you referring to upgrades from Fedora X to Fedora X+1 here, or are you referring to the nightly-ish "download and apply the latest set of updated packages to Fedora X"
From my experience, the latter breaking things is quite rare, usually due to an upstream bug, while the former is more common, but at the same time, is to be expected.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 14:47 UTC (Sat) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link] Ubuntu LTS for desktops, IME&O:It's a nice idea, but at least for the rules of engagement that were (are?) used for Dapper I don't think it's very useful. Two years (the next LTS, which is the only usefully supported upgrade path) is at least twice too long to wait IFF volatile things like Firefox don't get some sort of new-version during LTS lifetime option. My wife's machine ran Dapper from somewhere around the time of its release (may have switched her during the extended beta, a couple weeks ahead of release) until shortly after Hardy, and there were issues with both web-based and other services that had drifted past the support in Dapper's packages (Gaim, I think, but there was another that I can't now recall that's used by a bunch of the Distributed Proofreaders gang that was an annoyance) well before the next LTS came along. Then again, Hardy was not all roses either - the biggest one was that they insisted on sticking Firefox 3 in, without proper versioning/alternatives support, at a time when it was in our opinions grossly unready. That's the price a project pays for leaving large swaths of functionality to be added by third-party extensions: if the extensions one relies on aren't ready, neither is the base project. Oh, and pulseaudio, which Just Worked on some machines and Just Didn't on others. That has gotten better since release, though my own desktop still had some issues until I switched the old Creative card out for a low-end Diamond. On the server side I'm using Debian Etch and nothing else. I had a test server using whichever Ubuntu release was current around the time Etch came to fullness, but saw no advantage to it, and of course there was no supported upgrade path from the existing Sarge installs to Ubuntu. I suppose I ought to reevaluate that again now, but I doubt I'll have the time for it, especially as I've had no complaints about Etch for servers. I'm not really happy with either the six-month or the two-year cycle for desktops; the former is just too damned much churn, the latter really is too long for the inherent rate of change in services one wishes to connect to. Note that I am NOT talking about corporate desktops here, so I don't expect any commercially-funded distro to pay the least attention to this... footnote: when I talk about a supported upgrade, I mean an in-place upgrade that doesn't need a lot of manual fixup afterwards. Having been accustomed to this level of support since I moved all my machines from Slackware to Debian a decade ago, anything less is annoying. I don't expect perfection - if the upstream has drastically altered the config file format there's not much to be done about it other than leaving things in a safe state until the admin can revise it - but it's never acceptable to just dump old config settings. Debian has come awfully near this goal repeatedly; Ubuntu seems just a bit less reliable, but the desktop stuff has gotten a lot more voluminous since I switched to Ubuntu for those machines, nor have I been keeping a written score.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 21:23 UTC (Sat) by ceplm (guest, #41334) [Link]
> shortly after Hardy, and there were issues with both web-based and other
> services that had drifted past the support in Dapper's packages (Gaim, I > think, but there was another that I can't now recall that's used by a > bunch of the Distributed Proofreaders gang that was an annoyance) well > before the next LTS came along.
That's the exactly kind of experience I am after -- long-term support means supporting even beyond the upstream end-of-support, and that means backporting. And backporting means *a lot of* work. Extreme case if RHEL2.1 which has IIAC kernel 2.4.9. But even RHEL3 (which is five years old, so Canonical would still support it) has kernel 2.4.2*. I really wonder whether Canonical will find volunteers to dig into this archeological excavations if the need arises.
Fedora\\\\\\ Ubuntu and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 13:21 UTC (Sun) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link] Well, I misspoke - Cally says she'd had no issues with Gaim. It was a thing named psi, which had in common that it was an instant messaging client and not much else, that got to be lagging. And that provides no evidence one way or the other, as psi wasn't (and still isn't, in Hardy) promised support, as it's from the universe section. My own earlier migration away from Dapper had more varied reasons, but desktop programs with deeply tangled library version needs and non-supported packages were the motivations I can recall; nor were those two categories non-overlapping (backporting a newer psi for Cally foundered on library version clashes, for example - I remember trying that).Frankly, if I had it to do over again I'd have stayed on the six month upgrade cycle - it's more frequent than I'd like to have to deal with fixing the inevitable rough bits (if nothing else, making sure none of the non-supported packages haven't gone missing), but that's less annoying than waiting two years for a supported upgrade path. And yes, I've experienced the unsupported way - easier just to reinstall IME. Been there, done both, neither is fun. etc-keeper may help somewhat with restoring local configs - remains to be seen. Ttwo years seems overlong, and five years sheer madness, given the current volatility of the Linux desktop environment - you either destabilise by trying to introduce new versions/backports (which by definition has changed the behavior somehow, otherwise you not have done it), or else you're so moribund you get wiped for a fresh install of something usable. Now servers are a little different, but I can't say anything about using Ubuntu there - mine are all running Etch. :-)
Fedora\\\\\\ Ubuntu and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 22:16 UTC (Sun) by ceplm (guest, #41334) [Link]
One small terminology reach to other distro culture (having been in past member of both, I hope I can at least work towards more understanding). There are two quite different meanings of the word "backport". In Debian world it means porting of packages from unstable to be used on stable with old libraries, etc. In the Fedora/Red Hat world it means (if I am not mistaken) is to patching old version of the package to fix for bugs fixed in the later package which is not part of the concerned release of the distribution (i.e., stuff Debian and Red Hat maintainers do for Debian/stable and RHEL respectively).
Fedora\\\\\\ Ubuntu and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 22:20 UTC (Sun) by ceplm (guest, #41334) [Link]
> Two years seems overlong, and five years sheer madness, given the current
> volatility of the Linux desktop environment
Did you notice, that RHEL 5.2 included rebase of all substantial desktop applications (e.g., OOo and gecko-related stuff)? Of course, it is in CentOS as well.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 22, 2008 16:28 UTC (Wed) by jonasj (guest, #44344) [Link] To answer your original question:Being a Red Hat employee I know too little about Ubuntu -- could somebody share their experience how good LTS support of Drapper really is? How many packages were updated in the last year (or last six months)?You can check out all the changes to dapper at https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/dapper-changes and judge for yourself. That mailing list gets a notification for every package update in dapper. Similar lists exists for other ubuntu releases of course.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 20:57 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
A have been both a fan and a critic of Fedora. (As some of you around here have likely noticed.) Fedora is a great distro as long as people let it be what it is. The problem that I see is not so much with the distro itself, but with its "fanboys". I should probably qualify my use of that term. I use it very literally. Fedora, like any distro, has fans... and it has fanboys. The fans are positive but honest about what Fedora is, and what it is appropriate for. The fanboys want to present Fedora as something which is all things to all people. They want to call one a troll for saying that it is not really a production distro. I know this very well because I have been called exactly that for saying exactly that in various forums. As a technology showcase, Fedora is great. As a production distro... well... it depends *very* much on exactly what you are doing, what you need, what you expect, and what resources you have to pick up when Fedora's goals diverge from your own. (Fedora devs are quick to say "that's not our problem" when goals diverge.)
In a nutshell, I think that I can trace most of my satisfaction with Fedora to the stated goals of the project, and most of my dissatisfaction to allowing myself, at times, to start to believe some of the claims that well-meaning fanboys make about it. To the point that I deploy it where I should have used CentOS or Ubuntu. I F8'd when I should have CentOS 5'd at a client site early this year, and it was pretty embarrassing. Things did eventually work out. But I'm waiting for a window to open to side-grade to CentOS 6. I'll have to do at least one more Fedora upgrade before that happens, though. And I'm not sure whether it should be to F9 or F10. If I do F10, they're good for another year. If I do F9, they get something that has been tested for a while, but have to upgrade again in 6 months. And it is unclear when RHEL6/CentOS6 can be expected.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 21:22 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
"Things did eventually work out. But I'm waiting for a window to open to side-grade to CentOS 6"
This I believe sums up the underlying community experience that is open for improvement in the Fedora ecosystem. Instead of trying to re-invent Fedora so it meets the needs of long timescale deployments, is a transitional process from Fedora to CentOS or RHEL achievable for users who need it? Can work be done to make it easier for a Fedora installation to be transitioned into a CentOS or RHEL deployment when the local admin decides the rapid rate of change in Fedora is no longer suitable for the deployment situation?
Would the admins who would potentially benefit from this sort of transitional effort inside the Fedora ecosystem of distributions contribute their own time into finding a way to ease such a transition?
-jef
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 3:45 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] I believe the only reasonable way of doing this is rescuing the modified configuration, install from scratch and retrofit the saved configurations. This is what we did by hand when the Fedora churn became too much (and furthermore lost synchrony with the terms here).
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 2:17 UTC (Sat) by Nord (guest, #35114) [Link]
> As a production distro... well... it depends *very* much on exactly what you are doing, what you need, what you expect, and what resources you have to pick up when Fedora's goals diverge from your own. (Fedora devs are quick to say "that's not our problem" when goals diverge.)
Any comments I've seen were about "community does not wait for any single". But look at the typical sitution: I'm an ordinary desktop user, it is not too difficult to me to install new Fedora to see it, to test it and write several bugreports to Bugzilla. But with the current Fedora policy this situation becomes less widespread, because Fedora guys don't worry about compatibility. They may easily break anything, which are currently working, of course saying "that's not our problem". Switching to new Fedora release is more and more similar to playing "Russian roulette": a few persons would like to play, a fewer stay alive (in a sense of being Fedora users). Less people means less testing, more bugs stay unrecognized, and project's collapse in a near future become possible.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 19:32 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
I don't believe a Fedora LTS will ever fly, because it has too much overlap with RHEL/Centos+EPEL, which means the ROI of such an endeavour is likely too small to attract enough contributors.
However, people could easily make the need for a "Fedora LTS" less by pursuing two efforts:
Both those efforts do not require the huge endeavour of creating yet another major distribution, just to contribute a little more to existing efforts.
Remember, both Fedora and EPEL are open community projects, their lack of features/lack of stability can always be fixed from within.
Of course that's less grand that announcing a new Foo LTS project, but I strongly suggest to forget this idea if you've not a billionaire with some pocket money invest in the idea.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 21:41 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] Jon Stanley says: Fedora's stated goal is to advance the state of free software.Maybe it is now, but it wasn't always that way. When the project started out, the primary goal was to produce a community supported general purpose OS (see the original Fedora web site for details. Yes, being on the leading edge of the open source world was mentioned, but the main goal was to produce something usable as a general purpose OS. Those goals have sadly long since been removed from the site, as the focus has changed. As for a Fedora LTS, I think the problem might lie elsewhere. RHEL/CentOS is a much more appropriate distribution for that, and I'd love to run one of them on my servers, but quite frankly, they're obsolete. I don't need the bleeding edge that is Fedora, but I do need something a bit more up to date than RHEL. Take python, for example. RHEL is still using 2.4, which is positively archaic. 2.5 was released over two years ago, and 2.6 is available now. I don't know if there is a published timeline for RHEL releases, but I've seen speculation on the net that RHEL6 could be as far away as Q2 2010. So potentially, I'll need to wait up to 4 years between python 2.5 features becoming available and me being able to use them in apps I want to deploy on RHEL. That's simply not good enough. The gulf between Fedora and RHEL is simply too large, and there needs to be something to fill it. Either Fedora needs LTS, or RHEL needs more frequent releases. Yes, I know just how much extra maintenance overhead that would involve for Red Hat, but I suspect it's probably a better solution to them problem than Fedora LTS. But either way, something needs to happen, because at the moment, the gap between the two appears to be being filled by Ubuntu...
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 21:51 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Are you saying that the gaps between Ubuntu LTS 6.06 and Ubuntu LTS 8.04 are smaller than the gaps between RHEL 4 and RHEL 5? They both have about a 2 year gap between releases.
Since the RHEL and Ubuntu LTS release calendars don't sync up, they are essentially staggered about a year apart, there is no direct technology comparison. RHEL 4 is a year older than Ubuntu LTS 6.06 which is a year older than RHEL 5 which is a year older than Ubuntu LTS 8.04. All of them will become stagnant overtime.
-jef
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 22:15 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
Are you saying that the gaps between Ubuntu LTS 6.06 and Ubuntu LTS 8.04 are smaller than the gaps between RHEL 4 and RHEL 5? They both have about a 2 year gap between releases. """
Well, that's 22 months for Ubuntu LTS. RHEL4->RHEL5 was 25 months. It's looking as though RHEL5->RHEL6 is going to be significantly more than that. (Whatever happened to "predictable release schedule" as a selling point for RHEL?) In my experience, I can trust Ubuntu non-LTS releases more than I can trust a new Fedora "bleeding edge" release. So, if the need arises, I can feel reasonably comfortable upgrading a client from an Ubuntu LTS release to a non-LTS release, with the intent of upgrading to the next LTS release when it becomes available, all without being uncertain about their future upgrade path or security patch coverage.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 22:26 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
For the record.. I was hoping the person I replied to would actually answer the question I asked.
Your comments again point out that there is a desire to see an upgrade path from fedora into the enterprise relevant offering. Will that desire manifest itself in the form of community leadership to drive effort towards that goal?
-jef
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 23:44 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
For the record.. I was hoping the person I replied to would actually answer the question I asked. """
For the record, this is an open forum. The person you asked may freely reply at any time.
"""
Ubuntu has managed to fulfill that desire for many users and, increasingly, for admins. It is now incumbent upon Fedora devs to either respond to that desire or not, at their discretion.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 0:09 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Whether or not Canonical has been able to do it sustainably is still open for debate. I look forward to Shuttleworth being able to announce that Canonical is breaking in their service business around LTS.
In the meantime, for the next several years until that happens, I'm more than happy to talk to any group of people..volunteer or commercial entities which would like to help extend the Fedora project services in a sustainable way..by committing to contributing their time or resources to that effort.
-jef
Fedora and long term support -- copy the Ubuntu solution Posted Oct 18, 2008 3:37 UTC (Sat) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587) [Link] Perhaps the solution is simply to take Ubuntu's idea of LTS and apply it to the Fedora/Red Hat divide -- e.g. Fedora 10 (or 11) would become RHEL 6. The official paid RHEL support would be for a selected set of packages. All other packages would be unofficially (or community) supported. The attitude of "Fedora is upstream for RHEL" should be removed -- anybody worth their salt reads this as "Fedora is a beta / proving ground for RHEL" anyway. Sidenote: I recently had to install a Linux based OS on a new machine (projected lifetime: 5 years). As much as I like Fedora (used it since F1), it's simply too unstable and breaks too many things between releases. RHEL 5 / CentOS 5 are too ancient to consider seriously (the requirements for the machine were a recent gcc, python, etc). Ubuntu fits this niche perfectly, as the upgrade path is clear and a lot less error-prone. Having said that, Ubuntu's/Canonical's contribution to the community is a considerably less than Fedora/Red Hat. Rather disappointingly I had to put Ubuntu on the machine.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 21:28 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
Whether or not Canonical has been able to do it sustainably is still open for debate. I look forward to Shuttleworth being able to announce that Canonical is breaking in their service business around LTS. """
I would like to point out that you are attempting to generate Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt surrounding Ubuntu. This is not the first time you have done that; It seems an ongoing campaign. That is, in my opinion, beneath the dignity of the Fedora and Red Hat communities, and I recommend that you cease, lest it be thought that the Fedora community condones such shady tactics.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 21, 2008 9:33 UTC (Tue) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
Would you please stop doing that ?
You do this repeatedly and it amounts to nothing more than FUD.
Yes, it is true that Ubuntu, or more precisely Canonical, may fold at some unknown time in the future. This is true of all other distributions too. There is no evidence that Ubuntu is about to have the plug pulled on it, and it's not as if it's the first linux-company to run in the red for a while.
Please stick with actually relevant critiques and drop the insulting FUD. There's no guarantees Redhat will be around in 3 years either. That's just how the world works.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 21, 2008 15:44 UTC (Tue) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
You guys need to stop. Don't feed the Spaleta troll. He makes up FUD because he can't stand Ubuntus success and it even turned into hatred towards Mark.
I am not joking. Just look at any story on LWN about Ubuntu and you will find long posts describing his twisted view of reality.
Just ignore him.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 21:51 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I've run every Fedora since FC1, as well a the old box-set Red Hat releases going back to the late 1990s. It was clear when FC1 came out that it was, in effect, the beta for what was going into RHEL releases, so everyone expected it to be bleeding edge and a bit rough, though not as rough as Red Hat marketing people of the time were suggesting (they were actively trying to scare non-hobbyists away from Fedora by exaggerating its instability and risk).
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 1:24 UTC (Sat) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
Fedora Core 1 was tolerable. When they released Fedora Core 2 with SELinux
turned on by default was when it was a nightmare. I've got a Fedora 10 box beside me and it is actually quite nice. Most of my workstations are Ubuntu thought because it "just works TM".
Ubuntu doesn't belong on a server, RHEL or CentOS does. Just my 2 cents.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 1:49 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Fedora Core 2 did not include SELinux by default in the GA release. You are plain incorrect about that. I assume you are referring to the development release (rawhide), when you refer to "Fedora 10" as well.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 0:22 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
Fedora Core 2 included it. IIRC it was set to permissive mode or disabled. I can't remember which. But I'm not sure what the significance of your "correction" is other than to prevaricate, since the SELinux nightmare did begin in earnest in Fedora Core 3. (I recognize a tactic that you have employed previously.) It was only in FC6 that users were even provided the tools to fight SELinux effectively. Does the fact of its introduction being in FC2 or FC3 really make a difference today, 4 years later?
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 0:49 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Getting the details right is always important even if we are discussing something in the distant past. SELinux was not enabled by default in Fedora Core 2. So the claim that it was a "nightmare" for that release was obviously incorrect. If your experience is only with a test release of Fedora Core 2 then extrapolating it to the GA release or even a later release would be incorrect which I have seen many many users do.
Fedora Core 3 (only about a dozen network facing services and I doubt it presented any major obstacles) and later releases up until Fedora 8 enabled only the targeted policy by default. Strict policy was available in the repository however. In Fedora 9, strict and targeted policy was combined together.
Tools related to policy management were provided right from the beginning including ones to manage SELinux booleans, audit policies etc. I am assuming you are referring to SELinux troubleshooter which is only one among many of the tools provided within Fedora related to SELinux.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 2:10 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
Getting the details right is always important even if we are discussing something in the distant past. """
The most important detail regarding SELinux is that there has been a great deal of pain experienced by users. Turning off SELinux is still a standard policy among those users, though actually saying so in public has become stigmatized.
It is good that Fedora devs had the presence of mind to provide tools to turn it completely off.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 3:40 UTC (Sun) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I've run my home systems with SELinux on for some time. By now, they've gotten the kinks out, and the only way to do it was to get lots of people running it and working out the bugs.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 3:58 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Same here. Yes, it was a pain at the start, now it is almost unnoticeable.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 3:59 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
I've run my home systems with SELinux on for some time. """
Good for you. Last I looked adding a printer using lpadmin with SELinux enabled created a situation where the printer worked perfectly... until the system was rebooted, and then it was as if you had never executed any of your lpadmin commands.
"Security" is supposed to do less damage to you than to the other guy. I'm not at all sure that SELinux achieves that goal except in certain select circumstances.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 10:48 UTC (Sun) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link] Good for you. Last I looked adding a printer using lpadmin with SELinux enabled created a situation where the printer worked perfectly... until the system was rebooted, and then it was as if you had never executed any of your lpadmin commands.Bug number please. I'm willing to bet it got fixed within days of being filed.... if you actually bothered to file it. The SELinux folks are really good at responding to bug reports like that.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 16:15 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
It was in RHEL/CentOS. So it made it quite a few "days" before being fixed. Months to years, actually.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 22:49 UTC (Sun) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link]
> It was in RHEL/CentOS. So it made it quite a few "days" before being
> fixed. Months to years, actually.
You claim to be impartial, yet I find many of your comments to be incredibly annoying and with half-FUD.
http://people.redhat.com/dwalsh/SELinux/RHEL5/
Where is the bug that you filed for your issue? If you speak in generalities without citing real examples then you are spouting FUD.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 2:09 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
You claim to be impartial, yet I find many of your comments to be incredibly annoying and with half-FUD. """
Warren,
I don't claim to be impartial. I claim to be a RHEL/Fedora fan with some complaints. I'm sorry that you find my comments to be annoying, and take issue with your claim that they are "half-FUD". I certainly respect your contributions.
Please do not hide behind the "where's your bug report" facade. I may have reported it. But I think I worked around that irritation and moved on. IIRC, I had 6 retail stores to open that weekend.
Bugs in RHEL/CentOS are rare enough. I don't want to give the impression that they are not. But the bug I reference did make it through the process, bug number or no. And it's Fedora that's really buggy.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 10:55 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Any actual bug reports related to SELinux are usually fixed within a very short time. As David Woodhouse indicates, SELinux developers are among the most responsive and fix any real issues very quickly. Despite unsubstantiated claims to the contrary, actual stats (smolt, RHN etc) indicate that majority of users leave SELinux enabled on their systems and that number tend to go up over time.
There are many real world security exploits getting mitigated or prevented by SELinux. It is also getting adopted by Ubuntu and even OpenSUSE. Feel free to draw your own conclusions from all that but it seems obvious to me.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 14:04 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
You don't have to take my word for it. Install RHEL/Centos 4.3. Create a printer with lpadmin. Test it out. Reboot the machine... and you will find that it does not even appear in printers.conf. This may be true in the current 4.7 release, as well. It made it through Fedora and at least 4 releases of RHEL. Why not 4 more?
Ubuntu provides the Selinux libraries in Intrepid. But the far more sane and less problematic AppArmor is used by default. I have not kept up with what the MS-Linux devs are doing. But last I looked, AppArmor was the default there, as well.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 15:34 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Filing a bug report is easier for you and certainly much easier than getting me to install another operating system to verify any bug. I am not questioning your claim. Merely saying that reported bugs have a much better chance of actually getting fixed and that SELinux developers are a pretty responsive bunch in my experience.
Ubuntu doesn't seem to have included the latest policies yet but they likely will considering that Tresys is working on it.
I am not sure, Apparmor has a bright future considering Novell's action's.
http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9796140-39.html
It is unlikely, Ubuntu has developers working on it either. This is a still a solution that hasn't gotten upstream yet though it might change at some point
http://james-morris.livejournal.com/35287.html
Let's see
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 19:02 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
Filing a bug report is easier for you and certainly much easier than getting me to install another operating system to verify any bug. """
That's pretty typical of my interaction with Fedora officials: "You are the user. We expect you to do the work".
No wonder Fedora has lost so much ground with Linux users over the last few years. I won't mention which distro has picked up all the ground that Fedora has lost.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 19:38 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Steve, you are now bordering on trolling. You are talking about a CentOS bug and then referring to losing Fedora users. Get your story straight. No project can magically fix issues without it getting reported with the specific details.
If popularity is the only argument for all the tired conversations, Windows must be fixing all their bugs to be so popular! Yes, Fedora does rely on its users to share some of the burden and I believe so does all Linux distributions. In this case, it is simple: You as a user report the SELinux bug you claim to run across and developers will fix it pretty quickly usually completely for free. Seems a fair deal to me. I am not going to install CentOS 4.7 to verify the bug you claim to exist.
A) Because I am not a CentOS user. I run Fedora on pretty much all my systems 24/7 and my primary system at the moment runs rawhide in part because I want to help fix bugs before it hits most users. That will help you, the CentOS user as well in the long run but not immediately.
B) The particular issue with printers is unlikely to be something I can verify easily considering that I don't have access to a printer at the moment.
If that makes me a bad guy, so be it. Good luck.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 21, 2008 3:13 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
Steve, you are now bordering on trolling. """
I don't think so. Microsoft certainly must be doing a few things right to retain their popularity with the general public. Though, as we both must know, they do a few things wrong, as well. Conversely, Fedora does a few things right, and a lot of things wrong, as well.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 21, 2008 6:42 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I am sure Fedora does some things wrong just like any other project but not fixing unreported CentOS bugs isn't in that list. I am happy to tell you that.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 23:27 UTC (Mon) by mmcgrath (subscriber, #44906) [Link]
"No wonder Fedora has lost so much ground with Linux users over the last few years. I won't mention which distro has picked up all the ground that Fedora has lost."
That's so strange - all of our metrics, which are publicly available btw, show a continued growth in use of Fedora. As to which distro seems to have picked up all the ground we've "lost" which metrics / numbers are you referring to?
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 21, 2008 3:01 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
As to which distro seems to have picked up all the ground we've "lost" which metrics / numbers are you referring to?
Do I even need to mention it? No doubt the absolute numbers show an increase. Go Linux! Go Home Computing, and Computing in general!
But Fedora's percentage of the market has fallen dramatically in the last few years.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 21, 2008 3:11 UTC (Tue) by mmcgrath (subscriber, #44906) [Link]
Sorry, that's an opinion. Not a fact. Show me metrics from any distro or show Fedora how it's own metrics show lost share. Any actual facts released by a distro will do, otherwise you're treating opinion as a fact.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 8:09 UTC (Sat) by pcampe (guest, #28223) [Link]
>As for a Fedora LTS, I think the problem might lie elsewhere. RHEL/CentOS
>is a much more appropriate distribution for that, and I'd love to run one >of them on my servers, but quite frankly, they're obsolete. I don't need >the bleeding edge that is Fedora, but I do need something a bit more up to >date than RHEL. Take python, for example. RHEL is still using 2.4, which >is positively archaic. 2.5 was released over two years ago, and 2.6 is >available now. I don't know if there is a published timeline for RHEL >releases, but I've seen speculation on the net that RHEL6 could be as far >away as Q2 2010. So potentially, I'll need to wait up to 4 years between >python 2.5 features becoming available and me being able to use them in >apps I want to deploy on RHEL. That's simply not good enough.
I think that the solution for this is having a RHEL release once per year (now is about every 18 months) with a shorter lifecycle (now it's 7 years).
But you cannot *desire* to have the latest python release on a production server, as you don't want to have the latest gcc release (and C language has been standardized some *decades* ago). This is because all the certified software on RHEL, which is a major asset for Red Hat when they sell RHEL to large customers, will need to be re-tested, and it's simply a too big effort for a marginal improvement.
If you really need python 2.6, you could: a) install it by yourself, this is not forbidden by Red Hat, you just have no support for it; b) create a virtual machine that contains it, so you could further separate between production and stable systems and advanced systems.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 23, 2008 3:35 UTC (Thu) by mmarlowe (subscriber, #11374) [Link]
I somewhat agree with this, but with the following comments:
A new RHEL release each year probably isn't going to happen (RedHat wouldn't want to release that frequently). I think they release every 2 years now and I've heard of movement towards the cycle lengthening rather than shortening (RHEL having a 8YR lifetime, and new releases coming out every 3-4 years - "the half way point in each releases lifetime").
RHEL does an excellent job of what is designed to do -- I can't believe Dell/HP/IBM are selling new servers that are fully supported under RHEL3, yet that is apparently the case as I see frequent discussions of the matter on vendor mailing lists. Larger or very production focused companies need to use not only a single distribution but a single release across multiple generations of hardware and over a prolonged period.
Of course, within the first half of the enterprise lifetime, RedHat is putting out new service releases every 6-12 months with slightly enhanced/newer functionality that meets the needs of most production users.
The needs that are not meant, however, and which have caused so many users to switch to fedora are:
Are these needs being met in fedora? Yes, somewhat, but at the cost of essentially creating a 2nd distribution with its own set of problems rather than simply extending RHEL. The split between fedora and RHEL is really a high maintenance solution(of which I think is eventually doomed), and its natural that RedHat will want to minimize the costs associated.
I have yet to see a clear explanation of why RedHat shouldn't solve this situation by:
Some readers are probably thinking this is nothing more than a reinvention of "RedHat Linux", I don't think so because:
Maybe I'm missing something, but the whole Fedora project has seemed like a waste of effort to me from the beginning.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 23, 2008 8:55 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
It is totally unrealistic to expect a system with only 24 months cycles to work. Fedora has a 6 months release schedule because you *need* the release reality check this often to avoid drifting into vista-like land.
And even with a six month schedule people still think Fedora drifts too far into experimental land.
Musings on python by a fairly long-term user. Posted Oct 18, 2008 17:14 UTC (Sat) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link] You need to understand that I love Python - it's been my language of first choice for most things (viz., applications-level work) for years now. I mean, heck, Python saved my from PHP! <wink>But the way the language changes - no, it's not so much that it changes that's a problem. At the language and base library level they really do a pretty good job of minimizing the necessity of writing backwards incompatible code. It's the way nearly everyone else doing Python library, framework, and application development seems unable to resist using every new feature the moment it becomes available, with little or no apparent consideration as to whether the benefit, as opposed to the shinyness, of doing so really should outweigh consideration for backwards compatibility. The Django web framework is a blessed exception to this tendency, but alas it's an all too rare one. The typical Python project relies (at least in its actively developed trunk) on features available only in the very latest release of the langauge, even when they're merely syntactic sugar for something that's been easy enough to do for years; the typical Python project also lasts only a few years, if that, before becoming abandonware. Of course a lot of opensource projects go that way no matter the implementation language... So anyway, before I wander further off track, I don't think a two year old version of a langauge is obsolete by any sane criteria. The language developers seem to agree - not only 2.4 but even 2.3 has had a minor version release this year. I think this churn is a real issue - it's not an original thought, but consider how beneficial the relative stagnation of the Perl language seems to have been for its adoption. A language really shouldn't be a source of frequent new shinyness - it's role is to be the platform on which you build stuff, and stability in that base platform is a real help to application developers, at least ones who need to deploy to more than a handful of boxes they keep in a froth of constant updates. Consider again Django - it's changed amazingly in the three years between the initial public release and its long overdue 1.0 release, but I believe it still works with Python 2.3, as was originally targeted as a goal. I know for a fact it runs under 2.4 just fine, though I can't speak to the vast majority of the third-party apps out there...
Musings on python by a fairly long-term user. Posted Oct 21, 2008 0:19 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] Why do you think it is bad for a language to improve over time? Often language improvements let developers do things they couldn't do before or let them express things more concisely (which usually results in fewer bugs). It has managed to do this while maintaining good source level backward compatibility. Python certainly isn't the only language to have seen improvements in recent years (generics in Java and C# come to mind). What you seem to be complaining about is libraries and applications that have made use of these features without thought for compatibility with older versions of Python. There are a number of causes for this:
I can understand you being annoyed at the second two cases, but just as often it is one of the first two. When I was working on version 2.0 of PyGTK, I moved the minimum Python version requirement up from 1.5 to 2.2 because I needed the new class system introduced in that release. It caused some short term pain, but was the right thing to do. Similarly, Django uses the decorator syntax introduced in 2.4 to good effect, which cuts off support for 2.3. At some point, the benefits of the new syntax just outweigh the downsides of requiring the newer version (where this point occurs depends heavily on what platforms you're targeting of course).
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 1:01 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
We put into production a brand new service based on Fedora 5 systems. And then when CentOS 5 was available, we gradually switched to that (not by upgrading, but by buying new hardware). We needed features that weren't in RHEL / CentOS 4 and so we basically had to hope that the Fedora features would be in the next Red Hat release and that we wouldn't see unacceptable problems meanwhile. I wouldn't have even /thought/ to blame Fedora or Red Hat for any problems we encountered as a result of that gamble. On my own machines I run Fedora, but that's because I'm happy to chase the six month cycle.
What you see in that Fedora thread is definitely "I want a Pony". Too many people are basically taking the list of upsides to long term support, and the list of upsides for bleeding edge and thinking "I want everything on these lists, and nothing from the downside lists, and I don't want to pay a dime or help make it happen".
There are a lot of "OS tourists" these days. They run a Linux distro for a week, then they install SkyOS. Then they get a cracked 64-bit Vista installer, and then it's on to FreeBSD, and then a different Linux distro, and then Solaris x86, and so on. They don't really "use" any of these systems any more than a tourist "lives" in the cities they visit.
I bring the "OS tourists" up because I think they're partly responsible for this unreasonable specification of the problem. For them, every OS must have the maximum possible new and exciting stuff since that's part of the fun of these endless OS installs. Yet, since they spend so little time actually running the OS compared to getting it set up, of course they want a completely fiddle free install and zero maintenance, none of the teething problems associated with a bleeding edge Linux distro like Fedora. I believe it's impossible to satisfy such people, and pointless too, since a week after you satisfy them they will install some other OS anyway.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 3:57 UTC (Sat) by nicku (subscriber, #777) [Link] I find it surprising that Wikipedia ever considered using Fedora as a server platform. At my work and home, I use Fedora on my desktops, and at work, RHEL/CentOS on the servers. Any fancy features needed, such as an OpenLDAP server that works with many slaves? Grab the Fedora or CentOS RPMs, base something on them, and release them. I upgrade my desktops the day the new Fedora comes out (or earlier). I upgrade the servers when they need it to do their job properly, hopefully not too often, as there are far more of them than just my desktop. I am puzzled by the yearning for ponies here. We all already have them, in every colour, performing wonderful tricks for us in our own front gardens.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 19:54 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
> I find it surprising that Wikipedia ever considered using Fedora as a
> server platform.
The wikipedia article has been widely misreported and taken out of context by fanboys with axes to grind.
What it basically says is that wikipedia has experienced explosive growth, moving from a size where it's ok to use a small set of cobbled together servers with heterogeneous systems (their mix included Fedora, old Red Hat Linux, etc) to a size where this heterogeneous mix is prohibitively expensive to maintain (well known situation in any big org).
So at one time they had to say "anything but this mix of heterogeneous stuff, we'll take *one* option and use it everywhere". And then they gave this article stating how nice it was to have a single system to support, now they've gotten rid of the old mismatched stuff.
Their single option happened to be Ubuntu LTS, but there's precious little in the article suggesting Centos (or a BSD, or OSX) wouldn't have been as good for their needs.
I guess "wikipedia consolidates on a single system, saves admin time" would not have made the headlines. But there's nothing more to see in there.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 21:08 UTC (Sat) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link] There are quotes like this from the CTO of wikipedia, saying basically they were heavily pre-disposed to Ubuntu. Which is fine, they are basically supporting something themselves so whatever they happen to prefer is best in some ways. But, to me, it heavily implies that no matter what Fedora or CentOS or RHEL had done, they'd never have won them over at this point in time ... which makes reading through the 3rd incarnation of this flamewar particularly worthless.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 9:22 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
The FAQ wikipedia put on the subject basically confirms they had admins that were used to Debian. So a derivative made sense for Wikipedia, though they could have been badly burned by jumping on LTS before the LTS process had proven itself (and it still needs a few years before it proves it can deliver as well as RHEL/Centos' nice track record. The last years are the harder in any long term cycle).
It also points yum was less nice than apt two years ago, which may or may not be still true (since yum has been in rapide development since).
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 7:58 UTC (Sat) by pcampe (guest, #28223) [Link]
Wikipedia is a more or less complex web infrastructure, running on some kind of hardware I don't know but I can imagine of a common type, if not a commodity.
So they can do everything they need by using a production oriented distribution (Slackware, Debian, RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux, SuSE, ...) and it's an absurdity to even evaluate Fedora as a computing platform for their needs, unless they have on the web server their human users that struggles for the latest release of OpenOffice. I am sure they have not.
I don't know why they have chosen Ubuntu, I hope is for technical reasons and not a political move, but Fedora has a completely different scope, and I do not want to have a stable Fedora, whatever it could means, as derivatives of CentOS are already on the ground.
If someone whines for the poor choices of software from a stable distribution, s/he could, at first, activates external repositories (oh yes there are! they work!) and then joins the related development communities, I'm sure they'll be happy.
There's a joke that states "Ubuntu is an african word which means: I'm unable to use Ubuntu". I do not want that Fedora will mean, someday in the future: "I'm unable to customize CentOS/SL".
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 19:31 UTC (Sun) by Simetrical (guest, #53439) [Link] See the reasons for the choice (and other common points) in the Wikimedia Ubuntu migration FAQ. Partly it was just a matter of preference (like APT better than yum, more familiar with Debian-based distros), but also because of concrete objections to Fedora (too bleeding-edge) and RHEL/CentOS (too old).
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 2:52 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
My God. That FAQ pretty much states my whole perception of the Linux landscape over the last couple of years. Current distros would do well to pay attention to Wikipedia's reasons for mass migration.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 9:15 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
Wikipedia is somewhat unusual (they have highly specialized servers and basically can deploy their own specialized sauce over the general-purpose distribution of their choice).
This is not really applicable to any org with varied needs, can not afford to replace every stack it uses and must go with what their chosen distribution ships.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 20, 2008 19:24 UTC (Mon) by pcampe (guest, #28223) [Link]
Read the FAQ, thank you.
It makes me wonder when they say "we need to make sure we have our RAID drivers and reasonably up-to-date LAMP and image-rerendering infrastructure software." Every RAID controller you can find in a server is supported by RHEL/SuSE and server market Ubuntu is the newcomer.
Maybe Ubuntu has a better support for poor RAID controller, the motherboard based cheap ones as it's more desktop driven, but I hope for them that they run their infrastructure on something of a better quality.
It seems to me that they have used for a long time Red Hat and Fedora, found a lot of problem in using them in a production environment, have admins with a strong Debian knowledge, and finally choose to use Ubuntu as they could more easily switch back and forth from Ubuntu LTS and Debian Testing.
Security Breach? Posted Oct 18, 2008 12:41 UTC (Sat) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] Could this be related to the Fedora/RHEL security breach, and the subsequent clam-up?
Security Breach? Posted Oct 18, 2008 18:26 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
I don't see a reason for that. Most decisions like this are done months in advance so it would have been started before the breach. My guess is that they saw a bigger win-win working with Ubuntu than working something out with say Red Hat or CentOS.
My guess is that Ubuntu has a higher 'sex-appeal' than Debian, etc.
Security Breach? Posted Oct 19, 2008 4:16 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
Could this be related to the Fedora/RHEL security breach, and the subsequent clam-up? """
Clam-up? Whatever are you talking about, Bruce? Fedora is a community based distro, completely distinct from such commercial based entities such as Red Hat. Fedora only acts according to *community* wishes.
Security Breach? Posted Oct 19, 2008 4:27 UTC (Sun) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] Fedora only acts according to *community* wishes.We can't blame Fedora. They don't necessarily have the information.
Security Breach? Posted Oct 19, 2008 5:06 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
We can't blame Fedora. They don't necessarily have the information. """
Or can't reveal it.
Security Breach? Posted Oct 19, 2008 19:33 UTC (Sun) by Simetrical (guest, #53439) [Link] No. The migration has been ongoing since long before then. If you don't believe me or gmaxwell, you can check the Wikimedia Ubuntu Migration FAQ.
Security Breach? Posted Oct 20, 2008 9:11 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
This was not a constructive comment.
So far there is no hint the Red Hat incident had incidence to anything but Red Hat infrastructure (unlike some distributions that made countless third-parties revise their certificates for example)
The answer is simple: Red Hat Linux Posted Oct 18, 2008 20:20 UTC (Sat) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link]
Support: yes, for years and years
New releases: often Support for upgrade between releases: yes Cost: free
I miss it, let's bring it back.
The answer is simple: Red Hat Linux Posted Oct 18, 2008 23:53 UTC (Sat) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587) [Link] Support: yes, for years and years... Cost: free As appealing as it was, the above solution wasn't and isn't sustainable. On top of that, many corporate organisations didn't take Linux seriously until there was paid and reliable support (i.e. a company willing to put its reputation on the line for a Linux distro). Hence RHEL emerged. Part of the profits from sales and support of RHEL are fed back into further development of Linux and many other open source projects.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 18:52 UTC (Sun) by sgros (subscriber, #36440) [Link] Maybe someone already suggested it, but I'll try... What if every second release of fedora is supported only for six months, and the other second for a year and half? This would be enough that people don't have to constantly upgrade if they don't wish, would also allow someone to use Fedora for a server because of some must have feature and then to gradually transition to RHEL/CentOS. It would look something like:
0 6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48 54
+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+
<-A--------------->
<-B--->
<--C-------------->
<-D--->
<-E--------------->
<-F--->
<-E--------------->
This scheme could be further manipulated to get shorter/longer supported releases.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 23:15 UTC (Sun) by shaneo (guest, #48399) [Link]
This whole argument seems a bit silly. If you've got a product in the marketplace, you want to differentiate it as best possible so customers have a clear reason to choose yours. Unfortunately, in Linux distributions, the differentiations are subtle (despite what those of us close to them may wish to think). Fedora is clearly positioned as the bleeding edge--a distro which gladly opts for new/shiny/gee-whiz (with undoubtedly some input from Red Hat as to what things they'd like to have a bit more field-tested) over stable and easily supported. That's cool and seems to work for almost everyone.
If you want a more stable and supportable distro that's Fedora-like, you have the RHEL option (or CentOS, by proxy).
I've been amazed at the number of folks that have chosen the wrong distro for the wrong job simply due to their distro "religion". I used to work at Cisco where they ship most of their Linux-based products on in-house built distributions or variants of "known good" distros: largely RHEL or CentOS (e.g., CallManager boxes, ACS Express, etc.). However, some of their acquired technologies worked with Fedora and so they were immediately in the Fedora-based appliance game (e.g., NAC Appliance).
Can you support/harden/run a Fedora box for the long-term? Sure. Is it more work than doing it with another distro? Absolutely.
A modest proposal Posted Oct 20, 2008 12:08 UTC (Mon) by csigler (subscriber, #1224) [Link]
I'm sure I'm missing something because my suggestion seems (to me) very obvious (plus I'm late to this thread). Here we go:
I like Ubuntu. I use Edubuntu for a workstation lab I support at a classical school. Their needs aren't demanding, and Ubuntu Just Works(TM). But I never upgrade to the latest release until 2 or 3 months after it's out. That's partially because my schedule doesn't allow it, but mostly out of caution concerning bugs and regressions (esp. support for our old, donated hardware).
So, what's wrong with using Fedora but staying, say, 3 months behind the latest, most bleeding-edge release? For this to work, I guess one must assume that the real show-stopper bugs are fixed reasonably soon after release.
The one problem I see is that you're probably locked into a 6 month upgrade cycle. Fedora would need to provide support for 15, not 13, months in order to back off to a one year upgrade cycle. (FWIW, I haven't actively used Fedora or related dists since Fedora Core 1/2, but do have a bunch of RH experience from times past.)
Fedora and long term support Posted Nov 3, 2008 23:45 UTC (Mon) by eryian (guest, #55028) [Link]
Thanks for the well written article Jake.
I am a Fedora user myself, and I have always found it a little frustrating updating my computers with the release cycle. However, I accepted that as part of the way things are when I chose Fedora as my distro. If you visit Fedoraproject.org they very clearly state that it is a development distro that is not meant for production use. If you want to live on the bleeding edge, you use Fedora, which to me is the equivalent of using Debian Unstable/Testing.
I don't know many sys/network admins who use Debian Unstable on a production server, so I really don't understand why anyone would try to use Fedora on a production server either. If you like the RedHat world, and you want to run a stable production server, you can pay to use RHEL, or you can go free and use CENTOS.
For my little play around at home server, Fedora does the job fine, but I wouldn't dream of using it to run anything mission critical off of it.
As for Ubuntu vs Debian. All the comments below this article demonstrates where the problem is. Newbies like Ubuntu because the Ubuntu distribution and forums are friendlier.
The key word here everyone is FRIENDLY.
Not MEAN, SELF-SUPERIOR, SELF-RIGHTEOUS, and/or ARROGANT.
It's not because Ubuntu is the most amazing distro on Earth. It's because everything about it appears and feels more FRIENDLY. People like being treated patiently and with kindness, thats why the newer users gravitate toward Ubuntu.
If you visit the newsgroups and your a newbie, and you forget to bottom post, Goddess help you, you will get slammed with thousands of flames for the rest of the month, for presuming to post at the top of the historical text. Its even worse if you ask a very basic Newbie question without reading every single historical post in the forum first.
With all of Ubuntu's faults, I still prefer it over Debian, because getting help for Ubuntu is a lot less humiliating than getting constantly flamed when asking help for Debian.
Very few people are developers, and very few are knowledgeable computer users, the majority of people are just plain old end users who want to browse the Internet, listen to music, watch videos, send Email, and update their OOO Writer documents. Expecting people to have more than basic knowledge up front is just not going to happen.
Sincerely;
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