Defining the Fedora Project [LWN.net]

Defining the Fedora Project

Posted Oct 16, 2009 23:06 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433)
Parent article: Defining the Fedora Project

Mike McGrath says:

I understand that by narrowing our focus we might lose some contributors who disagree with our values and mission

The Fedora project is already failing to live up to its stated mission (particularly the goal to produce a general purpose operating system). And yes, it's alienating me. Despite having dabbled with the other options at various times, I've always felt more comfortable in the Red Hat world, and it's been my primary Linux distribution since 3.0.3. But lately, Fedora releases have been of such low quality, and of such a specific nature that they're becoming problematic to use on anything other than a home desktop class machine running GNOME or KDE. That's fine. But it's not what the project was set up to do, it's not what I want from a distribution, and it bodes ill for future RHEL releases too. Is the solution to further narrow the focus? Personally, I don't think so. That's going to doom you to obsolescence, because there will always be those that want to use it for something outside your chosen focus, and I think the number of people in that category will only increase.

After 13 or so years, I find myself having to look for a new distribution, and it's a depressing thought. I don't much like Debian/Ubuntu, OpenSUSE isn't great either. Arch is looking promising, but hell, Fedora still gets a lot of things right that the others don't. I like having SELinux and SystemTap and other goodies in all sorts of areas where Fedora has blazed the trail and the other distributions are still lacking. But it really is getting to the point where I'm going to have to switch :-(

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Defining the Fedora Project

Posted Oct 17, 2009 1:16 UTC (Sat) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link]

> The Fedora project is already failing to live up to its stated mission (particularly the goal to produce a general purpose operating system).

Actually that's what I'm advocating the goal to be. To produce a general purpose operating system. At present we don't have that goal. So what do we produce? You've got me but if you're not satisfied with it I can't say I'm surprised. After all, it's over 2,000 people working on a product with little oversight or direction.

Defining the Fedora Project

Posted Oct 17, 2009 21:35 UTC (Sat) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

To produce a general purpose operating system. At present we don't have that goal.

Sure you do. It's listed as the first of your objectives, and has been since the release of Fedora Core 1: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives.

What do you produce now? Mostly a desktop oriented OS. Try doing even basic things that would make it appropriate to a server build, like a headless install with the base packages only, and you'll see just how far from general purpose it actually is. If it doesn't work over a serial console, it's not suitable for a server (several of mine are in datacentres in the Far East, and you simply can't rely on having anything more). Now it's not that I actually want to use it as a server OS. I'd rather have something with a little less churn and a larger support window for that. Nor am I advocating Fedora LTS or similar. But if Fedora can't get that right, that's a bad sign for RHEL 6 being any use, and my servers are currently a mix of RHEL and CentOS, so that thought makes me very uneasy. It's not just issues related to servers, though. Horrendous dependency creep makes it virtually impossible to install a minimal desktop system, which some of us like to do for security and maintainability reasons. But the assumption is that you'll have the whole of GNOME, and if you try and install just the bits you need, yum pulls the rest in anyway.

Plus, of course, whenever I try and report these things as problems, they're usually either ignored until that release is no longer supported, or closed as NOTABUG. I know manpower is limited, and everything needs prioritizing. But it does seem like I'm fighting a losing battle even trying to get people to acknowledge the problems.