Defining the Fedora Project

Posted Oct 17, 2009 21:35 UTC (Sat) by Tet (guest, #5433)
In reply to: Defining the Fedora Project by mmcgrath
Parent article: Defining the Fedora Project

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.