Who is Fedora for? [LWN.net]

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 14, 2010 15:11 UTC (Sun) by danieldk (guest, #27876)
In reply to: Who is Fedora for? by asherringham
Parent article: Who is Fedora for?

I have experienced the same problems as the developer of the yum-
priorities plugin. Fedora maintainers pushed a patch to the stable Fedora
repositories that I rejected with good reasons (I think it was RHBZ
#249991). It broke yum for many people (who were not able to run even a
yum update), and was retracted about a week later.

After this episode I was convinced to never use Fedora, or recommend it to
others. The procedure was in sharp contrast to CentOS, where changes
were first tested in the testing repository for some time. And only after a
period with no objections, and only acknowledgements it was pushed to
CentOS-Extras.

The discussion who Fedora is for comes up again every now and then, and
I do not think things will really change in any way, because of Fedora's
purpose. Some will object to this: but Fedora was and still is Red Hat's
garder to test their new stuff that will eventually be in RHEL. If Fedora were
to become a more stable distribution with longer support cycles, it may eat
some of RHELs lunch (not all, since no support contracts are offered), and
RHEL loses quite a bit of its beta program.

Things will only change if Fedora becomes fully independent.

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Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 14, 2010 15:33 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The process is not in contrast because updates usually go via updates-
testing repository in Fedora as well but unlike CentOS which is rebuilding a
relatively smaller repository, Fedora is upstream, has a repository several
times larger, moves more quickly and has more contributors but amount of
feedback in updates-testing is not enough and these discussions are a way of
addressing that problem.

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 14, 2010 16:01 UTC (Sun) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

This is in sharp contrast, because CentOS usually only pushes minor
upgrades to -extras, and as you mention, only a small amount of packages
that are properly tested.

Fedora pushes quite major changes continuously, and a large amount of
them. You cannot expect testers to keep up with the amount and impact of
changes. The result is that packages will be pushed to the stable
distribution with to little testing compared to their impact, making Fedora
practically a beta distribution.

The solution is, of course, to only allow for very minor changes in a stable
version (security and reliability fixes). But Red Hat would never allow such a
policy, since it would be at odds with Red Hat's goals for Fedora. Hence,
my comment that things will only change if Fedora becomes more
independent.

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 14, 2010 16:15 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I assume that you did not read the followup news.

http://lwn.net/Articles/378393/rss

It's funny because Fedora Governance decided that it would appropriate
measure and did it despite your strong claims to the contrary. Even more
funnier is that fact that the decision is also being attributed to Red Hat.

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 14, 2010 16:51 UTC (Sun) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

Great, let's see in three to five years. It's not the first time this discussion
came up, and solutions were proposed:

http://lwn.net/Articles/316899/

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 14, 2010 16:53 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

So what? This is hardly the first time, a community has discussed something
on multiple occasions. There were some changes made then and there are some
changes made now. The decision you said would never happened already did.
Now would be a good time to take a step back and stop the naysaying.