By Jake Edge
August 14, 2013
The idea of organizing a distribution into "rings" appears to be an idea
that is resonating
right now. Last week, we reported on some
openSUSE discussions surrounding some of the problems the distribution is
experiencing, along with possible solutions. One of those solutions
involved separating openSUSE into cohesive chunks (i.e. the rings), each of
which is built on the capabilities of the lower rings. As it turns out,
Matthew Miller, Fedora's Cloud Architect, posted a similar idea to the
fedora-devel mailing list in July. It would seem that Fedora and openSUSE
are both experiencing many of the same problems—and perhaps coming to some
of the
same conclusions.
Miller not only posted his ideas to the mailing list, he also presented
them at the recently concluded Flock conference for Fedora
contributors. The slides, video, and transcript
from that talk are all available for those interested. In essence, the
mailing list post was a preview of what he presented.
After starting by outlining the obligatory good attributes of Fedora,
Miller pointed out some of the
same problem areas that SUSE VP of Engineering Ralf Flaxa noted in his openSUSE
conference keynote: Fedora is not as widely used as it could be, including
by users of RHEL, the distribution is not seen as particularly relevant (or
exciting), and it isn't a good base for others to build upon. To solve
those problems, Miller suggested the idea of breaking the distribution up
into rings.
Miller starts by describing Ring 1 as "Fedora Core"—a name that predictably
raised some hackles on the list. The original Core was
determined based on who maintained the package. Those handled by Red
Hat employees went into Core, while those maintained by volunteers went
into "Extras". There wasn't any way for the community to participate in
the development or maintenance of Core. In addition: "the quality standards for Fedora Extras, the collection of packages
built around the core, were much, much higher. Upside-down!", he
said. Those mistakes would not be repeated, he stressed.
So, Ring 1 contains the "base functionality and behavior that
everyone can expect of any Fedora system". It is, in effect, the
foundation for the higher levels. Underneath Ring 1 is Ring 0, which is
"Just Enough Fedora". It would be based on the current @core,
but would be slimmed down from there.
Ring 2 is less of a ring, really, and more of a collection of what Miller
calls "environments and stacks". Environments are
"where you run the code you care about", and he gave examples
like desktop environments, as well as cloud and virtual machine images.
Stacks are collections of tools used by other software, such as languages,
database systems, web frameworks, and so on. Perhaps X and Wayland would be
considered stacks in that model, he said.
The idea behind the rings is to give the Fedora special interest groups
(SIGs) a place where their customizations fit into the Fedora picture.
Each ring would have less restrictive policies as you move toward the
higher levels, so changes to Ring 0 for a Spin (which is the end product
of a SIG) would likely not be possible, and Ring 1 changes strongly
discouraged (or disallowed), but Ring 2 would be more open.
Some of the kinds of policies that SIGs might want to override include
packaging type (e.g. not RPM), changing software versions from lower rings,
allowing
some library
bundling, and the lifecycle. So, potentially a SIG could create a Spin
that had a longer life than the 13-month Fedora norm, for example, or that
certain package versions (a language, say) would be supported longer than
it is elsewhere in the Fedora ecosystem.
That "elsewhere" is what Miller calls the "Fedora Commons". It would contain
the packages that are outside of the Core and the packages would be
maintained in the same
way that Fedora does today. In fact, any of the packages that aren't
incorporated into Rings 0 or 1 would automatically become members of the
Commons. These
are the packages that SIGs could choose to maintain separately in order to
differentiate their Spins from the rest of Fedora.
Miller's proposal is quite lengthy and detailed, the description here
largely just hits the high points. There has been, unsurprisingly, quite a
bit of discussion on the list and it can only be characterized as "mixed".
That's not much of a surprise either—it's rare that a radical
reshaping of anything is met with immediate near-universal acclaim
(or condemnation for that matter). The transcript of Miller's talk
indicates that people are certainly interested in the topic as does the
mailing list thread.
It is, of course, just a proposal, and one that Miller makes clear is not
set in stone (how could it be?) at all. It is an interesting rethinking of
what a distribution is and how it might be structured. It is also
completely different than what other Linux distributions are doing, which
might make it fairly risky. Except that openSUSE may be headed in a
similar direction.
Perhaps that's the most interesting piece: two distributions looking to
grow their user and contributor bases are both considering fairly
radical—but similar—changes to their structure. Where either distribution
goes is anyone's guess at this point, but it will be worth keeping an eye
on the discussions and, if any should materialize, plans. Stay tuned ...
Comments (8 posted)
Brief items
I like it when you violently agree with me
--
Patrick Lauer
Comments (1 posted)
The "Luna" release of the
elementary
OS distribution is now available; see
this blog entry
for more information on this release. LWN
looked at elementary OS in 2011.
Comments (10 posted)
Distribution News
Debian GNU/Linux
Debian will be celebrating its 20th birthday on August 16 at this year's
DebConf in Vaumarcus, Switzerland. "
During the Debian Birthday, the
Debian conference will open its doors to anyone interested in finding out
more about Debian and Free Software, inviting enthusiasts, users, and
developers to a half day of talks relating to Free Software, the Debian
Project, and the Debian operating system."
Full Story (comments: none)
Lucas Nussbaum presents his monthly report on his Debian Project Leader
activities. Topics include a survey of new contributors, an ITWire
interview, logo registration as a trademark, delegations, and more.
Full Story (comments: none)
Fedora
Máirín Duffy has posted recaps of Fedora's Flock event. Even though she was
not physically present Flock was available to remote participants. The
recaps include links to slides and transcripts of the talks. Not all
videos are available yet, but you'll find links to those that have been
released. See the posts for
day
1,
day
2, and
day
3. (Thanks to Matthew Miller)
Comments (6 posted)
Newsletters and articles of interest
Comments (none posted)
Ars technica has posted
a
lengthy look at the business side of Canonical. "
What may
surprise some people is that Canonical could be profitable today if
Shuttleworth was willing to give up his dream of revolutionizing end user
computing and focus solely on business customers. Most people who know
Ubuntu are familiar with it because of the free desktop operating system,
but Canonical also has a respectable business delivering server software
and the OpenStack cloud infrastructure platform to data
centers. Canonical's clearest path to profitability would be dumping the
desktop and mobile businesses altogether and focusing on the data center
alone."
Comments (28 posted)
BinaryTides
reviews the security-oriented
Kali Linux distribution. Kali is the latest version of the BackTrack distribution (we
looked at BackTrack 4 in 2010), which is now based on Debian rather than Ubuntu. The review looks at the distribution itself and the "top ten" security packages that come with it. "
The "Applications > Kali Linux" menu has a separate list for the top 10 security tools. These are the most useful, popular and featureful tools that find immense application in various kinds of tasks related to security like penetration testing, security analysis, application testing etc. Most of the tools are the best in their fields with no other similar equivalent or alternative."
Comments (none posted)
Wired
talks
with FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard. "
And Hubbard believes
FreeBSD can still hold its own against Linux. 'It has greater provenance,'
he says. 'If I’m going to buy a car, I want to buy one from someone well
established.' He also says the project is more transparent and holistic
than most Linux distributions. 'You want a single source tree with
everything that goes into the system? You have that with FreeBSD. It’s
clear what parts go into it.'"
Comments (61 posted)
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