Fedora Core and Fedora Extras To Merge

Kelson writes to tell us about a Fedora Weekly News article reporting that, beginning with Fedora 7, the distinction between Core and Extras will cease to exist. This development comes out of the Fedora summit held in November. From the article: "Starting with Fedora 7, there is no more Core, and no more Extras; there is only Fedora. One single repository, built in the community on open source tools, assembled into whatever spins the Fedora community desires." Kelson adds: "The post goes on to list three 'spins' they plan to introduce at Fedora 7's April release: server, desktop and KDE. Presumably these would be 1-disc installation sets, with further packages downloaded over the network, rather than the 5-CD collection needed to install Fedora 6."

Who said anything about one CD?

[pembo13]

I've been following the development, and while the server install MAY be one cd, I haven't seen anything to suggest that such an artificial restriction would be set. If anything it may be a specific minimal spin.

How about a USEFUL spin?

[erroneus]

I've been a Fedora user from the start and a Redhat user before that. I have resisted everyone's pleadings about Ubuntu and all the rest. But one thing I wish would change (though I know never will) would be having the more fun and useful things included like DVD and other media playback support. Just house that spin in some other country that doesn't care about the patents and stuff...you know?

Re:It would be nice

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

If your machine locks up regularly, then perhaps you should look to something other than blaming Fedora.

Indeed. Clearly, it's the fault of the people who made gcc 2.96. *ahem*

It may be your configuration, your hardware, or various other causes, but if you're going to complain about Fedora, at least complain about the *valid* deficiencies...

If Fedora ships with a configuration that's unstable on particular hardware, and Debian doesn't---and you're not a developer---then choosing Debian is a smart and cost-effective solution. What do you expect?

I would prefer...

[jd]

...something along the lines of SLS or Slackware, where you have logical collections grouped together spread over as many disks as necessary. That way, you wouldn't need three different install spins - you could have just one - and all packages would be extensions. This has many advantages (fewer CDs for special-purpose uses, each collection can be updated independently, you can handle more permutations of install options, and so on) at the not unreasonable cost of having more CDs if you want absolutely everything.

However, I feel that there are enough packages where the number of permutations of compile-time options is large and where the number of dependencies between package types is unpredictable that the "ideal" would be to have a web interface that let you roll your own set of ISOs online with just the stuff you want with the options that you want. (This is more restrictive than, say, gentoo, but it would be about the same to QA as the current Fedora with less overhead for the admin than Fedora and less install time than gentoo.)

What about an "embedded" spin?

[Samrobb]

Seriously.

I spent the last 5 years working for TimeSys [timesys.com], and we did a lot of work to adapt various Fedora Core packages for embedded systems use.

One of the tools we developed along the way was something called tsrpm [timesys.com], a set of wrappers for RPM that makes cross-compiling RPMs a relatively painless process. It's open source (GPL), has support for a number of different processor architectures (x86, various flavors of ARM and PPC, etc.), and can be used to compile packages using a glibc or uclibc based tool chains. It's non-intrusive, and uses a hint file (standard bash shell script) to conditionally control various phases of the RPM and source code build process. It's even capable of building a cross-development tool chain from source RPMs, though that process can be a little hairy.

When I left, IIRC, we had over 300 RPMs, mostly from FC5, that we could build for a good 9-10 distros (variations of architecture/libc combinations). That was the result of myself and the tsrpm author (Chris Faylor) spending about 2-3 months on the whole thing... and that included the time it took for Chris to get new gcc-4.x based tool chains building for most of the architectures.

If anyone's curious, you can see the free-as-in-[beer,speech] releases of tsrpm and some whet-your-appetite FC5-based distros here [timesys.com].

Role Of Community

[quantaman]

This is interesting since Fedora Core packages are maintained only by Red Hat employees whereas extras contains both Red Hat and user maintained packages. I wonder if Red Hat will continue to mark a few important packages in the unified repo as Red Hat only, or if they might have more direct leadership over the unified repo than they currently do over extras.

KDE Spin?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am confused about this one - does this mean that unlike current Fedora editions, KDE will not be included at all in the main distro, but only in a KDE spin disc? And that, if few people actually download/use that disc, KDE potentially gets dropped from Fedora?

I.e. would we be in a situation similar to Ubuntu/Kubuntu where mixing/matching your environment from a single install disc won't be possible anymore?

And are we potentially looking a dropping of KDE from Fedora altogether? Being put into a separate spin is kinda like someone being put into "special projects" at work - one foot out of the door. :)

That would be pretty grim.

Re:I would prefer...

[J.Y.Kelly]

There are a few places out there with scripts that will build a distro from FC.

I belive that the intention is to use Pungi [fedoraproject.org] to build the isos for the newly merged fedora releases. Since this tool will be public then interested groups will be able to build their own images containing a custom set of packages.