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Defending the flame of Linux freedom (TechRadar)
TechRadar interviews Max Spevack, former Fedora project leader and current manager of the Red Hat community architecture team. Spevack talks about the relationship between Fedora and RHEL as well as the value that the Fedora community provides, not just to Red Hat, but to the Linux community as a whole. "Fedora stands on its own as an operating system, and it just so happens that Fedora is upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. No one is going to call Debian a beta of Ubuntu, but Debian is in many ways upstream for a lot of the Ubuntu packages in the same way that Fedora is upstream for a lot of the RHEL packages. That doesn't mean that one is a beta of the other."
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Cannot have it both ways Posted Nov 24, 2008 21:30 UTC (Mon) by massysett (guest, #52736) [Link]
First he says that Fedora is a shining example of Red Hat's community process, and then he says that Fedora is an operating system in its own right. Then he says that it "just so happens" that Fedora is an upstream for RHEL, and then he says that if you want long-term support for Fedora, go get RHEL. He ties it all up by saying that Fedora is not just an upstream for RHEL because nobody would say that Debian is just an upstream for Ubuntu.
Spevack wants it both ways. For some reason he takes offense at being called a big beta for RHEL, yet then he turns around and talks about how close Fedora is to RHEL and how people who want long-term support should get RHEL. I'm not sure what his motive is but it sure seems to be a strange argument for him to be having with himself.
Bad comprehension? Posted Nov 25, 2008 14:58 UTC (Tue) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]
I'm peering hard at the article, and can't see where he's taking offense at anything.
It's called "reading between the lines" Posted Nov 26, 2008 3:02 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]
It's reasonable to infer that he's responding to comments about Fedora being "just a beta" of the RHEL products. It's hard to view his comments as anything less than "defensive" or as a refutation of this point of view.
The fact that he chose to address those topics ... rather than the wealth of other available things that are related to Fedora ... makes is reasonable to infer that he takes offense, or at least takes exception, to the characterization of Fedora as "just a beta" of RHEL.
Comprehension is about drawing reasonable conclusions from communications in a context. It's not necessary for the article to literally say: Max Spevack takes offense at ... (or takes exception to) ...
I tend to agee with massysett here. The article harps on Fedora's independence while trying to also tout its deep interconnections. Tension arises from various aspects of balancing the goals and needs of the Fedora user and volunteer community versus those of its major controlling sponsor (Red Hat). Different parties have differing opinions on how well that balancing act is being performed, and that tension is a major and ongoing issue for the community.
The fact that you "can't see" this suggests that you are either deliberately blinding yourself to it ... or that you're sufficiently foreign to the context that you don't understand it. Those of us with honed analytical skills, objective and context will see the point. (I might have used the phrase "taking exception to" or even "refuting" but the point is still obvious).
Fedora compared to Debian Posted Nov 24, 2008 21:34 UTC (Mon) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
The situation with Fedora & RHEL is totally different than Debian & Ubuntu. If Canonical provided most of the boots on the ground for Debian, set the development schedule for Debian and finally and most importantly axed the stable releases of Debian and told people wanting stability to get one of Ubuntu's LTS releases, then the situations would be comparable.
Fedora compared to Debian Posted Nov 25, 2008 1:09 UTC (Tue) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587) [Link] Valid point about the differences in manpower provided by Red Hat for Fedora development vs Ubuntu for Debian. However, the betaness parallel between Fedora/RHEL and Ubuntu/Debian does exist in reality: by the time Debian makes a stable release, its packages are outdated. If one sticks to relatively fresh packages, then Debian (testing/unstable) can be considered as a perpetual beta for Ubuntu. I have observed a number of cases where Debian stable has been eschewed in favour of an Ubuntu LTS release (admittedly, my sample size is small compared to the size of the world).
Fedora compared to Debian Posted Nov 25, 2008 4:35 UTC (Tue) by vaib (guest, #48292) [Link]
Even debian testing(to be stable) and unstable are lagging behind. And consider that the current stable release has 747 bugs and next stable(testing) has 170 bugs, still previous one is called stable. The pattern I am seeing now is that to make a stable release they will make the unstable lag behind almost a year(or may be more than that) from cutting edge and by the time stable is ready its already obsolete. Stability has its own users and advocates but in the whole process unstable is suffering to breathe. As debian has large user base, by keeping themselves 1 year behind, developers lose feedback and required testing. Also many of its users wouldn't like to be sitting with a year old packages. Perhaps they need to draw a line.
Looks like a RHEL to me Posted Nov 25, 2008 7:45 UTC (Tue) by khim (guest, #9252) [Link] However, the betaness parallel between Fedora/RHEL and Ubuntu/Debian does exist in reality: by the time Debian makes a stable release, its packages are outdated. Remove Ubuntu from the quote and you'll get Fedora/RHEL raltionship in a single distro. Debian stable is... well... stable and outdated (like RHEL) and Debian testing is... well... unstable. Ubuntu just picks bits and pieces, but Debian stand on it's own. Fedora is incomplete without RHEL: Fedora 8 had some issues but was usable while Fedora 9 (PackageKit!) and Fedora 10 (new XFree86 with broken drivers!) are unusable so right now we don't have ANY version of Fedora to actually use. RHEL/CentOS closes this hole and makes the whole thing somewhat sustainable but without it it's just perpetual beta-test for sake of beta-test.
Looks like a RHEL to me Posted Nov 25, 2008 8:37 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
Fedora 8 had some issues but was usable... """
As long as you didn't need it to accept more than the (hard-coded into F8's gdm) limit of 16 XDMCP connections. It was like that for at least the first several months after release. Real (embarrassing) show-stopper for an XDMCP server.
Looks like a RHEL to me Posted Nov 25, 2008 20:43 UTC (Tue) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
> Fedora is incomplete without RHEL..
Exactly. The purpose of Fedora is to bring out quick releases to push new tech. This means they have no problem with putting out releases with totally broken subsystems. But the support window is such that you can't skip a release where something you depend on is broken without falling out of support for at least a short time, especially since you would be an idiot to put a new Fedora release into use without waiting a few weeks for the most severe bugs to get squashed.
The upgrade treadmill (with landmines!) combined with the lack of a stable branch leaves it is all but undeployable in any sort of production environment. So that leaves RHEL/CENTOS. But CENTOS, by definition, is just a rebuilt RHEL so we can ignore it for what follows. RHEL is not just a stable branch of Fedora. RH does all sorts of things to the tree as a mishmash of one or two Fedora trees get blended into RHEL behind closed doors with almost zero input from the Fedora community. Paying RHEL support customers get a say, but I'd guess the sort of shop that has folks around who are maintaining a couple of Fedora packages probably aren't paying customers, they can make Centos work on their own. They are 'paying' by contributing yet have no input into some of the key decision making.
This situation is exactly like if Debian dropped stable and Ubuntu took over that role... and they started doing everything behind closed doors with bugs reported by paying customers only visible to their inhouse employees. Just how long would the average Debian developer sit still for it? Sure every Debian developer runs Sid on their workstation or laptop but I doubt they run Sid on their servers and wouldn't like losing all input into the stable branch. The question is how long Fedora can convince their contributers to work on a project they can't actually use for much.
Looks like a RHEL to me Posted Nov 27, 2008 16:15 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Exactly. The purpose of Fedora is to bring out quick releases to push new tech. This means they have no problem with putting out releases with totally broken subsystems. But the support window is such that you can't skip a release where something you depend on is broken without falling out of support for at least a short time, especially since you would be an idiot to put a new Fedora release into use without waiting a few weeks for the most severe bugs to get squashed. Fedora is bleeding edge. That means that occasionally things break, sometimes badly. If you have a magic recipe to test out new technology and latest versions of packages, all without ever breaking anything, I'm all ears. Truth is, without Fedora (and similar chartered distributions) Linux (and open source in general) would not move forward. There certainly is a balancing act involved in keeping the whole working well enough that people do use it (and thus help shake out bugs) while moving forward and moving too fast and scaring people away by instability. Some people use the development branch of Fedora (rawhide) day-to-day because even that level of instability (suddenly X won't start, or your keyboard is gone, but that happens far-in-between) is bearable to them, stable Fedora releases suit others just fine, while still others demand rock-solid nothing-ever-happens stability. No distribution is perfect for everybody, but there is a distribution for everyone. That is the beauty of this whole Linux thing. And every one of them depends on the others, in one way ot the other.
Looks like a RHEL to me Posted Nov 27, 2008 16:26 UTC (Thu) by khim (guest, #9252) [Link] Some people use the development branch of Fedora (rawhide) day- to-day because even that level of instability (suddenly X won't start, or your keyboard is gone, but that happens far-in-between) is bearable to them, stable Fedora releases suit others just fine, while still others demand rock-solid nothing-ever-happens stability. Yup. And general purpose distribution should satisfy all of them - or it'll be little used niche experiment. Debian does this (stable/testing/unstable), Ubuntu does this (normal distributions/LTS versions), Fedora/RHEL does this, but Fedora by itself does not.
Looks like a RHEL to me Posted Nov 28, 2008 2:12 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
You need to consider the Fedora, RHEL and rebuilds as a family of distributions related to each other, rather than complete separate elements.
There is a different contributor base and audience for each of these distributions and in some cases, there is a significant overlap as well.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL is a good evidence of that overlap.
Looks like a RHEL to me Posted Nov 28, 2008 22:05 UTC (Fri) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link] Debian does this (stable/testing/unstable) unstable == fedora rawhide, testing == ? it's much less stable than a Fedora release, and only has a single stream. As for stable that tends to be _roughly_ the same age as a RHEL release, but without any of the support and a fraction of the errata. Ubuntu does this (normal distributions/LTS versions) Ubuntu releases tend to be much more like the old RHL x.0 - 0.2 releases, which might well be what the /. and lwn.net crowd wants (for free). There is no unstable/rawhide, and there is no stable ... you just get something in the middle which is a bit closer to the stable end than a random Fedora release. Canonical/Ubuntu would be worthless without Debian, in much the same way RHEL would be. And general purpose distribution should satisfy all of them - or it'll be little used niche experiment. So apart from all distributions failing this test, so dos Mac OSX and Windows ... are they niche too?
Looks like a RHEL to me Posted Nov 28, 2008 22:28 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
no, the fedora/RHEL combination do not match the debian unstable/testing/stable combination.
on the redhat side what's in fedora may not have any resemblance to what's in RHEL
on the debian side the testing migrates directly to (gets stabilized and renamed to) stable. I don't follow debian closely enough to say how unstable migrates to testing.
on the ubuntu side the LTS releases do closely match the debian stable releases (in terms of lifetime and stability), however the normal releases are somewhere between testing and stable. they don't have the life of stable, but they get significantly more attention than testing.
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