Fedora pre-redhat

Posted Nov 6, 2003 8:37 UTC (Thu) by snitm (subscriber, #4031) [Link]

The pre-redhat Fedora (Fedora.us) was started by a graduate student (Warren Togami) doing a school project to prove the strength of open-source software development. His work was essentially focused on being a HOW-TO organize a successful open-source project with a highly motivated grass-roots community. I'd say Warren likely got an A++.

Before fedora.us there were sites (which are still very active) like freshrpms.net and others that focused on creating high-quality add-on rpms for Redhat Linux. Many of the maintainers/developers responsible for these sites joined Fedora.us and that's how things _really_ took off. Other talented RedHat experts joined on too (e.g. Seth Vidal who develops YUM, a tool similar to APT). To make a long story short, Warren got the attention of the best and brightest non-RedHat Inc RedHat hackers.

Throughout the process Warren's primary focus has been establishing processes for organizing the Fedora.us effort. That is automated build-policies, web-of-trust among developers, QA policies, Bug tracking system, etc.

Fedora.us was making a real attempt at getting all their packages QA'd but in general Warren had a hard time at getting others to really chip away at the growing piles of packages needing QA. They started picking up steam (and continue to do so) and then RedHat developers gradually started to find their way onto the Fedora.us mailing-lists. I could easily see RedHat Inc employees getting increasingly interested in Fedora; and the rest is history.

So maybe that doesn't _really_ answer your question regarding package quality... suffice it to say the people involved in the new post-RedHat Fedora project have proven they can produce quality rpms given enough time and motivation. Not to mention there are quite a lot of Red Hat engineers that are really motivated to get Fedora off the ground; as is evidenced from yesterday's Fedora Core 1 release.

For people who are RedHat certified and all that; but that don't have the money to pony up for RHEL I'd recommend they get involved in Fedora. Making the jump to Debian is not for the average redhat-friendly developer; let alone your average RedHat user.

That said, Debian kicks ass, I use it exclusively for home use and devlop code on it daily at work... wouldn't have it any other way.. BUT its not for everyone; hopefully that'll change in the near future ;)