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Fedora and long term support

Fedora and long term support

Posted Oct 19, 2008 16:15 UTC (Sun) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
In reply to: Fedora and long term support by dwmw2
Parent article: Fedora and long term support

It was in RHEL/CentOS. So it made it quite a few "days" before being fixed. Months to years, actually.


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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/
On this particular topic, dwalsh regularly responds to RHEL bug reports and updates test packages of RHEL5 SELinux policies. He wants people to try the latest crafted policies here which eventually get pulled into the next RHEL5.x update release.

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.

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