What is Fedora's competitor? [LWN.net]

What is Fedora's competitor?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 6:07 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: What is Fedora's competitor? by jonth
Parent article: What is Fedora?

Rawhide tends to be even more bleeding edge since Fedora tends to do a lot more upstream development and tends to integrate upstream components directly very soon but yes, stabilizing the development branch of Fedora is part of the goal. A few important measures including splitting up the development repository via "no frozen rawhide" proposal and running automated tests via AutoQA project

https://fedorahosted.org/autoqa/

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What is Fedora's competitor?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 6:31 UTC (Thu) by jonth (guest, #4008) [Link] (4 responses)

I guess that implies Rawhide is closer to Debian's "experimental," which really _isn't_ for the faint of heart.

What is Fedora's competitor?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 14:19 UTC (Thu) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link] (2 responses)

>I guess that implies Rawhide is closer to Debian's "experimental," which >really _isn't_ for the faint of heart.

Debian experimental == Fedora rawhide
Debian unstable == Fedora
Debian stable/Ubuntu == Red Hat Enterprise Linux

In fact a Fedora release is best at very end, when updates are slow and most bugs are fixed. However, then all of sudden: No more security patches for you! And you have move to the next release with are lot of bugs and new "features".

I miss the best distro I have ever used: Red Hat Linux.

Talk about elephants in rooms

Posted Nov 1, 2009 11:42 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

You are missing the most used by far Debian branch: Debian testing. It is ideal for desktop used, continuously updated and breaks seldom if ever: for me it's been several years of rock-solid desktop use, with a trickle of bugs that get fixed before stable. Now that it has security support there is really little to complain about. If Fedora needs a role model I would suggest they study Debian testing closely.

Talk about elephants in rooms

Posted Nov 1, 2009 17:06 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Debian ceased security support for testing after the release of lenny:

http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/
http://lists.debian.org/debian-testing-security-announce/...

AFAICT that hasn't resumed yet.

What is Fedora's competitor?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 14:34 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I don't think repositories map 1:1 on like that. If you still want to compare, the new rawhide proposal creates two repositories that roughly map to experimental and unstable. Fedora release schedule is bi-yearly one with a ~13 months updates cycle.

RHEL is derived from a subset of Fedora packages (~2500 in EL vs 15,000 + in Fedora) and they are forked and maintained in parallel to Fedora releases for 7 to 10 years. So doesn't map to Debian well either since none of distributions (except for EL rebuilds) have such a long release cycle.