Distributions

Of rings and things

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 ...

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Distribution quote of the week

-- Patrick Lauer

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Elementary OS "Luna" released

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.

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Debian's 20th birthday

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."

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bits from the DPL - July 2013

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.

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Fedora Flock recaps

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)

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Distribution newsletters

• This Week in CyanogenMod (August 9)
• DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 520 (August 12)
• FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter (August 5)
• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 329 (August 11)

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Why Ubuntu’s creator still invests his fortune in an unprofitable company (ars technica)

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."

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Reviewing Kali Linux – the distro for security geeks (BinaryTides)

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."

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Apple’s Operating System Guru Goes Back to His Roots (Wired)

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.'"

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